For the past few weeks, all eyes have been on Rand Paul, the GOP's choice to represent Kentucky in the Senate. Paul, who credits the Tea Party with his recent primary victory, burst onto the national stage by repeating his claim that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was wrong to force businesses to desegregate. In Paul's view, businesses should be able to discriminate as they please because they are in the private sector.

Thankfully, Rand Paul can be voted down at the ballot box. But there's a more insidious force that's amplifying the voice of Paul and taking it further: Fox News. John Stossel, a contributor to Fox News and a Fox Business host, immediately rushed to Paul's defense on the May 20 edition of America Live, even chiding the candidate for not going far enough:

"I would go further than he [Paul] was willing to go ... and say it's time now to repeal that part of the law because private businesses ought to get to discriminate. And I won't ever go to a place that's racist and I will tell everybody else not to and I'll speak against them. But it should be their right to be racist."

And he made the point again a week later on another Fox show. This is, of course, nothing new from Fox, which regularly uses its platform to stir the pot of anti-government and ethnocentric sentiments. We've seen it before, but that doesn't mean we should let it go unchecked. With the backing of a major media company, Stossel is validating and creating space for the re-legitimization of race-based discrimination, which undermines the very notion of what American democracy is about.

Now, that's not how they tell it. Paul, Stossel, the tea partiers and others fashioning themselves as libertarians claim that they espouse a simple theory of limited government that grants businesses the right to conduct themselves as they please. They argue that the free market will take care of effects related to race--since they and countless others wouldn't support businesses that chose to discriminate, those businesses would eventually fail.

Either Paul, Stossel and adherents to their philosophy are naive or they're being disingenuous. There is nothing in our history to suggest that racist businesses would close simply by dint of negative public opinion. Indeed, we have every reason to believe that in some parts of the country they would thrive--people would patronize them because they discriminate, not in spite of it. Further, it's not clear where Stossel or Paul would draw the line on private discrimination. According to their logic, businesses should be able to refuse to hire people if they are black or brown. Homeowners could decide not to sell their home to someone of a different race. Do we honestly believe that market forces would right those injustices?