This kind of rhetoric has become the norm in the two years since Edward Snowden leaked the NSA’s classified secrets — in particular, the revelation that the government was collecting bulk phone records of Americans. “The government is taking away our privacy rights . . . shredding the Constitution,’’ so the arguments go.

“Your right to be left alone” by the government, Paul said in an impassioned speech from the Senate floor, “is the most cherished of rights.” We Americans fought a “revolution,” he said, to stop the kind of spying that is conducted by the National Security Agency.

Earlier this week, as Congress debated extending key provisions of the Patriot Act, libertarian Senator Rand Paul took up the mantle of principled opposition.

Let’s put aside the fact that there is virtually no evidence that Americans’ privacy rights have been violated, or the fact that Americans are so unbothered by the government collecting their metadata that 60 percent of them want to see it continue, or even that the government might possibly be a more responsible steward of this material than telecom companies.

The real disconnect in Paul’s war for the “right to be left alone” is his own hypocrisy. Paul thinks the government should leave you alone, unless you are a gay person who wants to enjoy the same rights of marriage that heterosexual Americans enjoy. He wants to keep the government out of your business, unless you are a woman who wants full control over her body and her reproductive rights. For Paul, the right to privacy ends where a woman’s biology begins.


As it turns out, Paul is more than willing to make exceptions to his strict libertarian views. “The government does have some role in our lives,” Paul says in explaining his opposition to abortion. “One of the main roles the government has is to [prevent] you from harming another individual.”

That holds true for Paul unless you want to vaccinate all kids to prevent harmful outbreaks of disease. Paul believes such vaccines should be “voluntary.” Another exception is the harm caused from discrimination by private business owners against people of color, which Paul has said is “boorish,” but should be protected.


It’s not necessarily a contradiction to be a libertarian and be opposed to abortion. “You can’t have liberty,” says Paul, without “a right to life.” However, for Paul that life begins not when a fetus is viable, but rather at conception. He’s even introduced so-called “personhood” legislation to that effect, which if taken to its logical end could lead to prohibitions on contraception, stem cell research, and in vitro fertilization.

Talk about the heavy hand of government.

Same goes for Paul’s views on same-sex marriage. In recent weeks, Paul has suggested that he could support a work-around that would allow people to have some sort of marriage “contracts,” but, ultimately, he still wants to “preserve” the “religious connotation of marriage that has been going on for thousands of years.’’ In laymen’s terms, that means having government dictate to gay Americans a narrower set of rights than non-gay Americans.

Talk about “big government” imposing its dictates on the American people.

Politics, of course, is not far from the surface here. Paul’s opposition to domestic spying plays well among his libertarian backers; and his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage is the price of admission to be considered for the Republican presidential nomination. And he certainly wouldn’t be the first politician to subsume his personal views to political imperatives.


Rarely, however, is the hypocrisy so glaring.

Michael A. Cohen is a fellow at the Century Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @speechboy71.

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