Warn Justice: No to corporate racism!

By now you've heard that the GOP's U.S. Senate candidate for Kentucky repeated his claim that a central piece of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was wrong, and that businesses should be free to discriminate against whomever they please. Rand Paul didn't seem to care that without federal intervention, people of color might still be second-class citizens in most aspects of American life. Thanks to our friends at the civil rights organization, Color of Change, we now know that FOX contributor and business anchor John Stossel went even further than Paul and called for the section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that applies to business to be repealed. And he's refused to back down, saying that:

"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."

In Stossel's America, corporations have a constitutional right to enforce racial segregation. Not in our America! This is a very dangerous moment. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons entitled to constitutional protections. Now Fox News Corp. is promoting the idea that the Supreme Court should protect "corporate persons" from the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Recent history has shown that the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act is still needed. In 1994, it was used to hold Denny's Restaurants accountable, after the chain repeatedly refused to seat Black customers. Just last year, it was used to go after a Philadelphia pool that prevented Black children from swimming there. We have to protect the gains of the 1960s era civil rights movement. We must prevent the absurd doctrine of corporate personhood from being used to strike down civil rights law. And we must expand our efforts to amend the Constitution to make clear -- once and for all -- that human beings, not corporations, are protected by the Bill of Rights. Act now. Sign below to tell the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice to prepare a public memo on the threat of "corporate personhood" to the civil rights of real people: