Rand just can't seem to come to grips with the fact that his entire life - even what happened 30 years ago - is going to be scrutinized. This was a very open and unblushing tactic that conservatives used ( and still use ) against Obama. Does Rand think he is above being examined? Apparently so, considering how he stormed off the stage like a child that was denied a cookie before bedtime.
Here's the ad he was referencing:
As the Daily Kos points out, Rand injected religion - his in specific - into this campaign to begin with.
From an article in May of this year by Sarah Posner of Religious Dispatches, she highlights how Paul spoke not only of his faith - in an interview on CBN's The Brody File - but that if all of America were Christians then we wouldn't need any laws.
I'm a Christian. We go to the Presbyterian Church. My wife’s a Deacon there and we’ve gone there ever since we came to town. I see that Christianity and values is the basis of our society. . . . 98% of us won’t murder people, won’t steal, won’t break the law and it helps a society to have that religious underpinning. You still need to have the laws but I think it helps to have a people who believe in law and order and who have a moral compass or a moral basis for their day to day life.
Posner goes on to show how Paul's version of Christianity is more like Christian Reconstructionism:
Reconstructionists share the worldview of the John Birch Society, which as Adele Stan reported, has enthusiastically praised Paul's victory over Republican Trey Grayson. (In 1963 -- the year Rand Paul was born and, he claimed on Rachel Maddow's show, he would have marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. -- the John Birch Society insisted that proposed civil rights laws were "in flagrant violation of the 10th amendment," and threatened individual freedom.) On the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, in 2004, the elder Paul stated on the floor of the House, "The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society."
Many Christian Reconstructionists believe certain forms of slavery are biblical. As I wrote in a post last month, the resurgence of the JBS (it was a co-sponsor of this year's Conservative Political Action Conference) alongside Christian Reconstructionism signals a resurgence of the sort of mish-mash of states' rights and individual liberty arguments made by libertarians and tea partiers -- in Paul's case, federal civil rights laws are portrayed as some sort of government invasion of liberty -- in which civil rights protections are flipped on their head and portrayed as antithetical to (white people's) freedom
Paul seems to think that good Christians don't need civil laws (or civil rights laws, for that matter) for them to do the right thing. But it's crucial to acertain what that "right thing" really is.
This proclamation by Paul that his "faith" - and by logical extension his "values" - are strictly off limits. After all, it's perfectly fine for Paul Tea Bagger fan base to question someone's faith if they are a black man with a funny sounding name.
I'm from a very conservative part of Kentucky. I would actually posit that it's one of the reddest counties in the state. Republican voters here have more than just policy in mind when they make their selections on election day. I would actually argue that many of them vote for a particular candidate simply because they say they are "Christian" and support "family values", regardless of that candidates policy agenda.
As an aside, about 90% of the Rand Paul campaign signs I'm seeing around my community are on "public" land. For some reason that seems a little odd to me, if only because Paul just might be a little to "extreme" for even this town. Then again, maybe I'm just reading too much into it.
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