Republican presidential candidate and polling asterisk Rand Paul visited Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa where a student asked him if businesses should be allowed to fire LGBT employees.
Rand son of Ron responded by dodging the very direct question and said LGBT people should leave their personal lives at home.
"I think really the things you do in your house, we could just leave those in your house and they wouldn't have to be part of the workplace, to tell you the truth.
These are very difficult decisions on what you decide will be an employer's decision and not. It really isn't so much about that question as it is about that is sets up a classification of a class of people who can now sue. So what happens is it sets up a whole industry of people who want to sue.
So if you happened to be gay and you get fired, now you have a reason you've been fired. But it's possible sometimes that people don't put up a sign saying 'I'm firing you because you're gay.' It's something that's very much disputed.
I don't know if we need to keep adding to different classifications to say the government needs to be involved in the hiring and firing. I think society is rapidly changing and if you are gay, there are plenty of places that will hire you."
Rand nor anyone else would ever say this to heterosexual people because that is not something they can be fired over. No one would tell an employee to stop talking about their heterosexual spouse or relationship or fire them for talking about it.
Rand, in his own specific words, says he does does not believe LGBT individuals should be allowed to sue a business for firing them over their sexual orientation. Their orientation, Rand says, should be left at home.
If you really believe in individual liberty, there's no room for double-standards. Rand son of Ron, however, clearly does not believe in individual liberty in a manner that he would have you believe.
Rand Paul would have you believe he's a strict constitutionalist, but his reverence for the Fourteenth Amendment is shaky at best. He does not believe LGBT individuals should be afforded equal protection under the law and should, in fact, be held to a different standard than straight, heterosexual people.
Of course, as you may recall, Rand Paul also believes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a Big Government overreach, so this may not be a big surprise.