Friday February 12, 2010
Pro-Abortion Rep. Patrick Kennedy Will Not Seek Reelection
By Kathleen Gilbert
WASHINGTON, D.C., February 12, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Pro-abortion U.S. Rep Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island has announced that he will not seek reelection following his eighth term in Congress.
“I will not be a candidate for reelection this year,” says the 42-year-old representative in an advertisement released Thursday and airing Sunday night.
Sean Richardson, the congressman’s former chief of staff, told the Providence Journal that Kennedy’s decision “absolutely, unequivocally has nothing to do with” his struggling poll numbers, or the surprise victory of Republican Scott Brown, who overtook Kennedy’s father’s senate seat last month. “He was talking about this decision long before any of these storms were on the radar,” he said.
Kennedy was also thrust into the spotlight last year after to a public row between the Catholic lawmaker and his local ordinary erupted after he accused the U.S. Catholic Bishops of not being “pro-life” because they withheld their support from the Democrats’ health care reform bill. The Church’s objections over the bill’s abortion expansion, he said, were an “absolute red herring” that only served to “fan the flames of dissent and discord.”
Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, RI, rebuked Kennedy for his remark, calling the pro-abortion lawmaker “a disappointment to the Church and to the citizens of Rhode Island.” In a subsequent open letter, Bishop Tobin warned Kennedy that his pro-abortion stance “absolutely diminishes your communion with the Church.”
Kennedy responded that he was “not going to dignify with an answer” the bishop’s letter. Kennedy later affirmed that Tobin had instructed him not to receive communion back in 2007 – an order Kennedy has flouted.
After his father Sen. Ted Kennedy passed away last year, Kennedy became the last member of the famous political family to hold public office – prompting characterization of his departure as the “end of an era” in American politics.
Though famously Catholic, and initially pro-life, the Kennedy clan absorbed a pro-abortion position amid the push for legalized abortion in the 1970s.
As early as 1964, the Hyannisport Kennedy compound hosted a gathering of leading Catholic theologians and college professors who coached the Kennedy family and its advisers on how to accept and promote abortion while still maintaining a Catholic identity.
One counselor, the Rev. John Courtney Murray, offered the Kennedys the novel position that “distinguished between the moral aspects of an issue and the feasibility of enacting legislation about that issue,” according to an account by former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, who attended the meeting.
(See Anne Hendershott’s WSJ column on the Hyannisport colloquium 1/2/2009)
See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Bishop Tobin Asked Rep. Kennedy Not to Receive Communion
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/nov/09112301.html
Bishop Tobin’s Public Letter to Rep. Kennedy
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/nov/09111111.html
Rep. Kennedy Questions Whether Bishops “Pro-Life” over Opposition to Healthcare: Local Bishop Demands Apology
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/oct/09102310.html
Pro-Abortion Kennedy Lauded as “Champion for Those Who Had None” at Funeral Mass
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/aug/09083101.html