And the hits just keep on coming:
WBSM Radio Host Ken Pittman: Right, if you are a Catholic, and believe what the Pope teaches that any form of birth control is a sin. ah you don’t want to do that.
Martha Coakley: No we have a separation of church and state Ken, lets be clear.
Ken Pittman: In the emergency room you still have your religious freedom.
Martha Coakley: (…stammering) The law says that people are allowed to have that. You can have religious freedom but you probably shouldn’t work in the emergency room.
Or as Red Mass Group sums it up, “There you have it folks. You should be denied a job because of your religious beliefs, because of laws dictated by the state. This is what Martha Coakley believes.”
(Headline via the hardest working imaginary manager in rock music.)
Related: More “Quotations from Chairman Martha,” from Power Line. Meanwhile, the Anchoress on, as she dubs them, “Two stupid, nasty women.”
Update: At Ace of Spades’ blog, Gabriel Malor links to the above soundbite and adds:
She knows that there are Catholics in Massachusetts, right? And other religious folks? And folks who may not be religious, but respect those that are? Eeesh.
Massachusetts is the second-most Catholic state. As of 2007 (latest year I could find data (DOC)) Massachusetts had eight Catholic hospitals, sixteen Catholic nursing facilities, and nineteen Catholic-sponsored organizations including hospice, home health, assisted living, and senior housing.
Coakley is an idiot.
Well, to be charitable, I don’t think she was expecting to have to put up a fight for this seat. Speaking of which, Jim Geraghty explores how the money pouring into both sides of the aisle in the race will play out on election day.
Update: The above soundbite is highlighted in this YouTube clip:
embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt
Related: Big Journalism reprints what must be the understated headline of the century from the New York Times-owned, Coakley-endorsing Boston Globe, which once again places its emphasis on keeping the left out of trouble, rather than reporting on news: “Some saw Coakley as lax on ’05 rape case.”
Read the whole thing — though not if you’re eating dinner.
More from Leon Wolf at Red State.org.
Update (7:09 PM PST): I’ll believe it when all the votes are in, and the lawsuits are settled, but the Boston Herald has a poll just out showing Scott Brown ahead of Coakley: ‘Brown-out’ poll shows Scott Brown trumping Martha Coakley.”
Brown is shown as being up by four percent — but I hope he’s keeping Hugh Hewitt’s famous motto in mind.
(H/T: Jules Crittenden.)
Update: Sissy Willis quotes a talk radio caller who says, “I know more Democrats who are voting for this guy than Republicans.” But for the sizable percentage of Brown voters who make up the latter party, that dovetails perfectly into what Erik Erickson calls, “The Story The Media Is Missing Because It Does Not Fit Their Narrative:”
The narrative, of course, is that conservatives want a totalitarian pure party with a purity test for the GOP. You want gay marriage? No way. Pro-choice? No support. For government assisted health care options? We don’t recognize you. At least that is what the media claims.
So the media has and is ignoring the alliance between left and right among the GOP in Massachusetts.
Scott Brown is not a conservative. He makes no pretension of being a conservative. He defends Romneycare, which most conservative have rejected. He is pro-choice. But he is for less government interference in the free market and less spending. Like Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, he is the perfect sort of Republican candidate for New England.
Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund is encouraging its members to support and donate to Scott Brown.. Marco Rubio is supporting Scott Brown. RedState is supporting Scott Brown. We, well . . . I, suspect he’ll give conservatives heart burn as New England Republicans do. But all of us know he is a good, pragmatic fit for Massachusetts. He’ll vote against Obamacare and he’d vote against a second stimulus. Conservatives do know, despite media and liberal Republican (called “moderate” by the media) claims to the contrary, that the GOP needs 51 seats in the Senate to have a majority.
Conservative and liberal Republicans are united behind Scott Brown. You’d think a mainstream media that has generated millions of words on television, radio, and print about conservatives demanding a pure party would take notice.
But that would shatter their whole narrative. And the last thing anyone wants to do at the next party at the Met or Sally Quinn’s house is mention the latest liberal friend in rehab or that maybe their group think on conservatives is shallow, self-serving, and vain.
And it’s all about The Narrative.
Update: In his latest op-ed, Jonah Goldberg adds, “Coakley may still win. But Democrats should be on notice: The fault for her sad performance lies not in the climate, but in themselves.”
Update: Maximum Pajamahadeen Roger L. Simon writes that Brown is up even further in a new PJM/CrossTarget poll. Still, a lot of dead people can arise suddenly on election day, and pace leading political commentator Bartholomew J. Simpson, they won’t be voting Republican.
“Seperation” from English, maybe.
Capacity,
That was a typo in the original, but fixed here — thanks.
Ed
Unfreakingbelievable.
It gets worse and worse and worse.
And I thought all the loonies were in CA.
Massachusettes *heh* have a lot of government-owned emergency rooms?
Funny, I can’t find “Separation of Church and State” anywhere in my copy of the Constitution.
It’s not a big college town either.
Hey Massachussets! A vote for Coakley is a vote for Nebraska
The emergency room is one of the places where you’re closest to your god. It should be near the top of the places you have religious freedom. Aren’t many places where you have more reason to pray!
So this lady running for the Senate says that, “the law says that people are allowed to have that [right to religious beliefs].”
“Allowed”? No, actually people own that right as an “inalienable” right from the Creator, and it’s in the Constitution to make sure government keeps its mitts off of it.
I have talked to several catholic women here in MA, some of them CCD teachers for the catholic church. They all believe in abortion and strongly believe that it IS killing a human being…..the Church has done and continues to do an outstanding job teaching Christianity in this state!
Techie: “Funny, I can’t find ‘Separation of Church and State’ anywhere in my copy of the Constitution.”
Try reading Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, explaining the meaning of the Constitution’s religious freedom clause. It’s an important enough document to be considered by the Supreme Court to be included as a basis for constitutional interpretation, so it obviously has some value.
Sorry, I must be missing the point. Are you implying that people whose religion prevents them from fulfilling certain jobs have the right to the job anyway? That people whose religion forbids contact with dogs or pork have the right to be hired as dog catchers or pig butchers even though their religion forbids them from carrying out their jobs?
Hey, they’re in charge of everything so I guess they think they can express how they really think instead of hiding behind their ‘moderate’ facades. They’ve deluded themselves into believing all Americans love their socialist tripe. But in 2010 there’s going to be hell to pay – so please Martha just keep on talking.
davidr – Mind telling me at what point Jefferson’s letter was ratified?
Are not ER personnel “pro-life” in the sense of saving victims of medical emergencies? Given BHO’s street-agitator advocacy of abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, death by Statist “culls” (his crummy li’l self excluded), Mde. Coakley might think twice before trusting her overdue hysterectomy to Dr. Mengele redux at Mass General.
As a Senatrix, she wouldn’t pay into FICA either.
What part of ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion’ do you not understand?
Idiot? Fool? Moron?
Am I the only one who thinks that, the more the description fits, the more likely she’ll be another typical Democratic senator?
Yep, I think she’s playing to the base and the donors.
-”That people whose religion forbids contact with dogs or pork have the right to be hired as dog catchers or pig butchers even though their religion forbids them from carrying out their jobs?”-
Target foods allows this for their Muslim workers & Swift Meat packing was forced to their Muslims paid time off during their work day to pray. Time that isn’t offered to non-Muslims.
Also the Senate healthcare bill she says she’ll sign, has virtually the same language she has been attacking Scott Brown with.
Ya have to live here (I’m in Barney Franks District) to understand, just how strong the Kool Aid is.
Bad as this quote is, the one that precedes it might even be worse. Coakley talks about “procedures required under … Roe v Wade”.
This is an astonishingly ignorant statement for an Attorney General to make. Roe v Wade “required” nothing.
Davidr: Jefferson’s personal opinions on that matter, or modern liberals interpretations of his writings are not founding legal documents of this nation, as you perfectly well know. You put forward a red herring.
That liberal SCOTUS justices pervert that constitution, irrespective of their “reasoning” or “sources”, is neither here nor there in this matter as well.
This is particularly true in the case Jefferson you put forward here for here we are considering the bill of rights and not the preamble.
Their musings in this matter–and in reality this is all they are, musings–are in fact extra legal and should have not valid place in constitutional law. Though it should not surprise that they would stoop so low, it is by no means the case that we should accept this sort of thing as anything other that a usurpation. But beyond all that, the language of the first amendment is quite ambiguously clear, as is the historical content that motivated its penning.
Techie is of course quite right, and you have dodged the issue. I suggest that you actually read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. While you are at it wrap your head around the actually reality of Religion in this nation prior to the Marxist assault on it in the post war era. Res ipsa loquitur, your argument is completely bogus. The constitutions meaning is completely clear and generations of Americans have understood this and lived out is meaning in their private lives and in their public institutions. You have projected a wholly foreign dictum on the American cultural, legal and political traditions to pursue alien ideological ends. Why can you not understand this simple reality? The Marxist version of “secularism” that we have been subjected to the last 55 years or so is the exception to the American notions of faith in the public sqaure; it is in no way a part of the vision of the founders nor part of the practice of American political or moral culture.
What is comic here is that you think that you have some deeper insight into the matter, but in fact, you do not have a basic understanding of what the civilized consider basic discourse. You also have little knowledge of the the nation as an actual country, nation or polity.
David, are you saying no one whose is against abortion should be a doctor or nurse, since their training require rotations through ED and OB/GYN?
I am begining to wonder if Martha isn’t taking one for the team.
Her recent hamfisted remarks and the truly disgusting TV ads are so bad that it shifts this election away from a referendum on Obamacare and Democratic government in general, it makes this election all about how bad a campaign Martha is running. If she loses this almost certain election, I am sure that Democrats will refuse to accept that it has any relevance to the national mood and was entirely due to her awful campaign.
Here is what else the Constitution says about religion:
Article VI, section 3:
“no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”
Requiring people who work in an emergency room to park their religious beliefs at the door as a condition of employment sure smells like a religious test to me.
If I were a liberal I would be really bothered that Coakley is just like Leiberman. She’s a sell out to the health insurance and pharmaceutical lobby.
I’m not a liberal so it doesn’t bother me as much.
But if I was a Massachusetts liberal that would make me want to stay home on a cold January voting day.
Whatever your politics, you have to admit that, even as politicians go, the lady is an asshat.
The Jefferson letter to the Danbury Baptists was to let them know that the Federal government would not have any say in how they practiced their religion. Government has no say in religion one way or another. They are prohibited from establishing a Federal religion of the land, that’s all. The “wall between church and state” that Jefferson talked about was purely to keep government out of the church not the other way around. Of course it was just a letter anyway NOT A LAW. If that were the case then the Federalist Papers would have more provenance to be Law than a letter to the Danbury Baptists.
Man o man Brown might just win this. Even if the acorn/seiu mob steals a close election, the country still wins. It just puts more emphasis on the fact that obama is either a socialist or a fascist. I have not decided which yet.
one: Catholics do believe in birth control, when it is done for good reasons (health, finances, premariage).
However it only approves of “natural” methods, which means using nature’s cycle or abstinence.
Two: The bishops allow contraception to be given a rape victim, but not abotifacient medicines.
The debate is if the pill discussed stops ovulation or aborts an early pregnancy. In the first few hours, it probably does the first and is okay, but some women come in days later, especially “date rape”, when the pregnancy is started.
If Target wants to bend over backwards to allow people of various religious persuasions to work there, more power to them, but they shouldn’t be required to. Forcing a company to offer benefits to members of some religions but not others certainly sounds unconstitutional.
“Requiring people who work in an emergency room to park their religious beliefs at the door as a condition of employment sure smells like a religious test to me.”
That’s certainly not a state office (well, not yet). I don’t know if it’s a position of public trust–if not, then the constitutionality doesn’t seem to come into question.
But it sounds as if you’re OK with cab drivers refusing to pick up fares with seeing eye dogs or pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions they disagree with.
Now do you see what we conservatives and/or rational people in Massachusetts have been dealing with? The electorate voted to KILL 2 thousand jobs by banning dog racing yet voted to de-criminalize marijuana. They voted NOT to eliminate the state income tax.Our politicians can’t interfere and control our private lives enough to satisfy them. Of course nothing applies to them and their friends. I think Mass residents have reached our limit. We can’t afford another tax, fee, fine, toll, or any more intrusions into our private lives. Brown is going to win this election with a caveat that the corrupt political entrenched machine in Massachusetts doesn’t steal it from him.
Sooo… You have religious freedom, unless you want to work in an emergency room… where you should not have religious freedom.
Oookay, got it!
If you are going to refuse to give particular kinds of treatment to a patient in an emergency room then you probably shouldn’t work in an emergency room.
Yeah, I’ll stand by that. Even if the worker is refusing for religous reasons.
Believe what you like, then do your job.
Let’s flip this around:
If you have religious freedom and can refuse to assist in an abortion or dispense “morning after pills”, can a Muslim doctor refuse to assist an Atheist, a Buddhist, a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu or a Shintoist if one was brought in to an emergency room? Can they just let them die? Can they actively assist in the death of an apostate, as their religion requires?
Can a cashier in a supermarket refuse to checkout bacon or shrimp because it is not kosher or halal?
Yes you have religious freedom. That does NOT mean you are free to impose that belief on others, or have the right to a job where your religion requires you to refuse some of the duties that job requires.
Instead, you should only take jobs that allow you to observe your religion and not whine if you are fired for refusing to do what you are hired to do.
Since Catholic voters continue empowering The Party of Death then they should not complain when they are bitten by the snakes.
50% of weekly Catholic goers voted for the President whose position against the sanctity of life is more extreme than NARAL.
Torture is knowing that single largest denomination in America whose foundational faith depends upon protecting the sanctity of life persistently empowers the Party of Death.
Serving two masters is messy work; The Catholics Church cannot worship Marx’s Church of Social Justice while believing they part of God’s Kingdom.
Catholics, stop worshiping two masters and you won’t get bitten by the serpent’s poison.
Yes you have religious freedom
Forced to worship Marx’s Church of Social Justice is neither freedom nor is it religious.
Rev Wright and Father Pliger serving the Church of Social Justice is an expensive dish eaten by tyrants.
Nancy Reyes:
one: Catholics do believe in birth control, when it is done for good reasons (health, finances, premariage).
one: Devout and Practicing Catholics believe no such thing. You are either misinformed here or are willfully mischaracterizing matters. Your statement here is a real howler. Devout Catholics do not even believe in premarital sex, let alone aborting a child conceived in such a sin.
two: You are conflating “birth control” with Abortion. They are not the same things. It is disingenuous of you to do so.
I’m with Tom Wright (comment #34). As such, what Coakley said wasn’t really wrong, per se… although it WAS a stupid thing for her to say.
(Rephrased: if a person has religious beliefs that prevent them from doing, in an emergency room, some of the things that need to be done in an emergency room, then that person is probably in the wrong job.)
The point is, however, that Coakley didn’t leave the choice with the individual. She didn’t say that such a person could make a smart choice and find a job more suited to them. She said that they “probably shouldn’t work in an emergency room”. She’s not just a private citizen with no power, expressing an opinion; she’s an Attorney General, and she’s campaigning to be a United States Senator. So when she says that, the implication is that she’d approve of passing legislation to that effect… and that IS wrong.
As I said at the beginning: it was a stupid thing for her to say. I don’t think she wants to close down Catholic hospitals. I do think, however, that she runs off her mouth too much.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
Daniel in brookline: Of course she was wrong in what she said. Her take on this is completely unconstitutional and therefore illegal. It also violates just about every employment code in the books, which garuentee protection against discrimination against creed or faith. What a thing to say.
Are you saying the practicing Catholics may not be in the medical profession or if they are in it must be forced to violate their religious beliefs merely because they do not suck up to the liberal agenda? What nonsense.
How absurd. You act like it is the decent people who are behaving exceptionally. In fact, we have been doing just fine the 140 you so years of our history before the left undertook this monstrous abuse of the constitution in order to ram through so called “abortion rights”. It is this ghastly “innovation” of the Left that is a departure for our traditions and a prevention of our laws.
It seems to me to be pretty axiomatic, we don’t want any of that praying and God stuff in a room full of fatally injured, sick or dying patients. Keep it out of emergency rooms and hospitals altogether, I say.
“Hey Security, we gotta Martha Croakley on bed 4 here in the ER, someone trying to pray over this multiple gunshot victim.”
“10-4, ER. Is it a reporter? We could try to push him over a gurney or something”
“Nah, one of the religious nuts…Mother Teresa”
“Gotcha, coming with the mace and handcuffs”.
If a guy in the ER wants Last Rites, do they wheel him outside? “We don’t allow any of that Catholic business here at Boston Mass…who said mass?”
And hey, this rather odd duck democratic senatorial candidate… who doesn’t want to be shaking hands with… people ? Great, the Howie Mandel of national politics.
Next thing you know, Al Franken will become a senator.
If a physician does not, for religeous reasons, wish to perform abortions, it is up to the hospital to decide whether or not to hire him, not the legislature or the atty general’s office.
Abortion is not “health care.” In 99% of cases abortion means to remove and destroy a perfectly healthy developing infant from the healthy reproductive tract of a perfectly healthy mother. Physicians or nurse practioners perform this procedure, but the procedure is almost never performed to prevent, treat or cure any disease, injury, or disability. Abortion is not “health care.” It has no part in curing people or caring for people, has nothing to do with assisting the sick or the injured. By refusing to participate in this procedure, Catholic health care workers are not only being true to their faith, but to their profession.
Coming from a Catholic family and being married to an Italian-Catholic who emmigrated from Rome, I find the comments of Martha Coakley beyond disturbing for not only someone who seeks higher office but as a human being. If she wins, what does that portend for the future of healthcare in America under Obamacare. We have this Coakley anti-Catholic sentiment for hospitals coupled with a President who hasnt even picked a church for he and his family to worship in. So much for the one nation under God part for the Obama Administration.
Second, here is a button of political expression on Coakley from the Centrist blog.
Please comment away, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what say you….
http://palinyoubetcha2012.com/wordpress/?p=8059
TeaBag radicals are the whole reason this country was in the mess it was in when the new administration took over. Your stupid ideas and insistence on confusing the Constitution with the Bible are the reason so may idiots have gotten elected to public office. Nobody wants your religious extremism in this country. Go move to a theocracy if you want one. Stop trying to turn this great country into your personal version of Iraq. You’re no different than the Taliban.
Religious supremecists who can’t do their job by providing BIRTH CONTROL should get out of the medical profession. Scott Brown’s biggest liability are his supporters. You show America exactly what his radical agenda looks under its surface. Typical “haves v. have nots” holier-than-thou hypocrites.
George,
You really should practice employing a bit more hyperbole to punch up your comments — your understated, nuanced approached may make it difficult for readers to grasp your message.
Regards,
Ed