Mass. Senate Candidate Coakley: Catholics Need Not Apply

To borrow a racial epithet from the 60's, Coakley said essentially that Catholics should not only move to the back of the bus they should be kicked off the bus.

PHOENIX, AZ (Catholic Online) - Catholics who are sitting on the fence in the MA Senatorial race were just handed a big reason to vote for Scott Brown. In Ken Pittman's Thursday radio program on WBSM-AM in Massachusetts he interviewed Martha Coakley who is a staunch advocate of the current federal health reform legislation.

Pittman questioned Coakley on rights of conscience and whether a Catholic doctor who agreed with the Pope's teachings on contraception should be required to go against those teachings and prescribe emergency contraception. Coakley resorted to the secular liberal playbook employing the canard of separation of Church and State and incredulously asserting that devout Catholics should not work in an emergency room.

To borrow a racial epithet from the 60's, Coakley said essentially that Catholics should not only move to the back of the bus they should be kicked off the bus. What possessed Coakley to make this slap in the face of the 39% of citizens of Massachusetts who are Catholics will be probed in detail in next weeks post mortem of this election?

Coakley's responses in this radio interview give Catholic voters a candid glimpse at her judicial, social and political worldview. What you see in Coakley's minds eye is a shocking degree of hostility towards the First Amendment rights of Catholics. Additionally, her strong support for the very unpopular Democratic health reform initiative, with its federal abortion funding, has alienated many voters, - Catholics, other Christians, other people of faith and many other people of good will as well.

As the current Massachusetts Attorney General, Martha Coakley should know better than to use the oft misused separation of Church and State metaphor to justify denying religious freedom rights to Catholics. Coakley knows full well that excluding the Church or her members from full participation from civic life, cannot be found anywhere in the First Amendment or any other part of the U.S. Constitution. To the contrary, the First Amendment was intended to prevent the federal government from trampling on the rights of all citizens who are religious, including Catholics.

Coakley's assertion that Catholic physicians lose their First Amendment rights to free speech, including religious speech, and the free exercise of their faith once they start working turns the Constitution on its ear. It is a dangerous position for any government official to espouse, let alone a State's Attorney General. As stated earlier, the First Amendment generally protects religious freedom from government persecution and certainly does not justify prohibiting the free exercise of religious freedom as Coakley asserted in her interview.

Coakley's hostility to the rights of conscience is precisely the type of government intrusion upon religion that the First Amendment is intended to protect us from. As such, one could reasonably say that the First Amendment was specifically intended to protect the citizenry from the likes of Martha Coakley since she favors using naked federal power to stamp out the exercise of religious freedom in the health care arena.

Coakley's comment also shows she is a liberal statist who neither understands nor respects the Constitution and its First Amendment protections of religious freedom. Similarly, Coakley's views evidence a profound disrespect for Catholic teachings and Catholics who follow the Church's teachings. In short, Coakley's views on religious freedom and health care are dead wrong and Massachusetts voters will have an opportunity to show her how wrong she is this Tuesday on Election Day.

Of course, the impact of Tuesday's special U.S. Senate election extends way beyond the borders of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Martha Coakley is the proverbial canary in the mine. We shall soon see whether Obama "change" inspired liberal policies are facing toxic headwinds that spell doom for other liberal Democrats who share Coakley's views.

The Massachusetts Senate election is a clear weathervane of the country's changing political landscape. It is a game changer in every sense of the word. If Coakley manages a narrow win, moderate House and Senate democrats will realize that voting lockstep with the ultraliberal Democratic leadership is a perilous and potentially career ending strategy.

The currently numerically significant Democratic majority in both houses will for all practical purposes shrink to a slim practical majority. As a result, Liberal legislative initiatives like cap and trade, additional economic stimulus plans and other liberal initiatives will now have to tread a difficult uphill road to passage.

On the other hand, a Brown victory in this bluest of blue states will spell doom for the liberal Democratic agenda. It will prompt a slew of Democrats to not run for reelection and the pending health reform effort may very well be stopped dead in its tracks.

Developments within the Bay state and on the national political scene have provided a helpful tailwind to Scott Brown's senate campaign. The increasing unpopularity of the health reform initiative and a poorly conducted campaign by Martha Coakley have leveled the playing field in a state where talented Republican politicians have often not fared very well.

Perhaps Martha Coakley's politically perilous assertion that devout Catholics should not work in emergency rooms, aka the "Catholic Slap", will be enough to carry Scott Brown to victory this Tuesday. If that does occur, there will be no mistaking that politically the times they are a' changing most certainly in Massachusetts and, possibly, for the nation as well.

-----

Mark Henry is a Catholic writer, speaker and author of "Finish Faithful", a how to guide on Catholic estate planning. He is a contributing writer for Catholic Online.

---

'Help Give every Student and Teacher FREE resources for a world-class Moral Catholic Education'

Copyright 2021 - Distributed by Catholic Online