The Distinction Between "Civil Rights" and "Civil Liberties":
Civil-rights laws are designed to protect people against acts of
discrimination in the private sphere -- in such areas as employment,
housing, or education. These laws generally specify a set of
characteristics that cannot be used to favor some people over others:
race, religion, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, and
nationality. In cases where such discrimination occurs, government
intervention is invoked. (Civil liberties, by contrast, are designed to
eliminate, as much as possible, government influence in the private
sphere.)
"Although the Democrats controlled both houses of the Congress at the
time, a much-higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats supported
the civil-rights bill. For example, in the House, Republicans voted for
civil rights by a margin of 79 percent to 21 percent, 136-35. The
Democrats' margin was 153-91 or 63 percent to 37 percent.
"However, the single-most-important vote for the legislation was the
attempt to cut off the anti-civil-rights filibuster in the Senate. In
order for the bill to pass, civil-rights supporters needed two thirds of
the Senate to break a filibuster by the opposition. Republicans voted
overwhelmingly to break the filibuster by 81.8 percent (27-6), but only
65.7 percent of the Democrats voted to end the filibuster (44-23)....
"Only a handful of Republicans opposed the civil-rights bill. The most
prominent among them was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who became
the party's presidential candidate in 1964. Interestingly, Goldwater had
always been a strong supporter of racial equality and supported the
Eisenhower civil-rights bills of 1957 and 1960 that strengthened voting
rights for African Americans.... Goldwater stated that workforce
discrimination was 'morally wrong,' but worried that in the future the
federal government might 'require people to discriminate on the basis of
color or race or religion' and, thus, in the end, opposed the bill."
