Given Ron Paul’s sordid history regarding race relations in America, particularly the derogatory statements about African-Americans published in his longtime newsletter, it’s not surprising that his son, Rand, upon winning the Republican Senate primary in Kentucky, immediately said that he didn’t agree with the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Since Rand is close to his father and shares the same paleoconservative libertarian philosophy, it’s worth further exploring Ron Paul’s views on these questions and whether his son agrees with them. While running for president in 2007, Paul was asked by Iowa radio host Dennis Raimondi whether he supported the federal government’s desegregation of public schools, a key part of the Civil Rights Act. “How would you have handled that as a person who believes in the federal government not getting too involved in the states?” Raimondi asked.

The short answer is that Paul opposed the Civil Rights Act. But here’s his lengthy reply:

"Yes, I would prefer that the states take care of this, as that’s the way that’s under the Constitution that we should do it. But back then we had the states doing the wrong thing. If your were in a neighborhood they would deliberately bus you out of the neighborhood in order to perform segregation and that was wrong. But the answer that they gave us was now they literally bus people in to promote integration and you should do neither. You should just have community schools and you shouldn’t have separate schools. But this whole idea that you can have perfections through government regulation by first busing people out and then busing people in—in a free society it is not a problem at all because parents are responsible for education and its either home school or private school. We’ve never really had that, we’ve always had public schools that were run locally, so if there are imperfections in the system it has to be dealt with by the people themselves as well as the school boards, but back in those days when there was segregation that was done by government so you blame all those problems on government and you just need to clean that mess up but not with the federal government under the constitution."

Paul seems to be saying that if schools were run locally there wouldn’t have been segregation and that if America was truly free parents would either home school their kids or send them to private school. Both claims boggle the mind. Is Paul saying there is no role for public education in a free society? Does Rand agree with that?

There’s a lot more questions that need to be asked and answered—about Rand Paul’s beliefs and that of the Tea Party movement that has so enthusiastically embraced him—before the campaign is over.