‘Do not confuse my father’s positions with your own’

Patrick Kennedy knocks Scott Brown ad

‘Do not confuse my father’s positions with your own,’ Kennedy said to Brown in a letter.
By MJ LEE | 2/27/12 6:43 AM EST Updated: 2/27/12 7:09 AM EST


Former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, the son of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, is demanding that Sen. Scott Brown stop invoking his father’s name in his radio ad about insurance coverage for birth control, charging the Massachusetts Republican is making “misleading and untrue” claims.

“You are entitled to your own opinions, of course, but I ask that, moving forward, you do not confuse my father’s positions with your own. I appreciate the past respect you have expressed for his legacy, but misstating his positions is no way to honor his life’s work,” Kennedy said in a letter to Brown on Sunday published online. “I respectfully request that you immediately stop broadcast of this radio ad and from citing my father any further.”

Kennedy was referring to Brown’s new radio ad in which he says, “Like Ted Kennedy before me, I support a conscience exemption in health care for Catholics and other people of faith.”

Brown continues in the one-minute message, “I believe it’s possible to provide people with access to the health care they want, while at the same time protecting the rights of Americans to follow their religious beliefs.”

Kennedy argues in his letter to the freshman senator — who won a special election to carry out the rest of Sen. Kennedy’s term after his death — that his father was dedicated to providing health care coverage to every American and that Brown’s support for the Blunt Amendment is “an attack on that cause.”

“My father never would have supported this extreme legislation,” Kennedy wrote.

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