The mailer claims that Scott Brown is opposed to treatment for rape victims. The reality is that Scott Brown had proposed an amendment, which failed, that would allow healthcare workers to avoid giving emergency contraception to rape victims if it was against their religious beliefs. He did not oppose the availability of the treatment to rape victims, despite his amendment failing, and he voted to override Gov. Romney’s veto.
But for the second time in less than a week, the Coakley campaign is using the amendment to give the idea that Brown opposes treatment for rape victims.
From the Washington Post:
Republican Scott Brown charged Saturday that a Democratic mailing against his U.S. Senate campaign violates a Massachusetts law prohibiting false statements against a political candidate.
The cover of a four-page mailer sent by the Massachusetts Democratic Party says, “1,736 women were raped in Massachusetts in 2008. Scott Brown wants hospitals to turn them all away.”
Brown is a state senator, and in 2005 he filed an amendment that would have allowed workers at religious hospitals or with firmly held religious beliefs to avoid giving emergency contraception to rape victims. The amendment failed, and Brown voted in favor of a bill allowing the contraception. He also voted to override a veto issued by his fellow Republican, then-Gov. Mitt Romney.
A section of the Massachusetts General Laws prohibits false statements against political candidates that are designed or tend “to aid or to injure or defeat such candidate,” with a penalty of to $1,000 fine and up to six months in prison.
Brown campaign legal counsel Daniel Winslow said, “People can shade things and spin things, but it has to have some kernel of truth.”
Coakley campaign spokesman Corey Welford said: “This is a failed attempt by his campaign to divert attention from the fact that Scott Brown filed an amendment that would have prevented women who have been raped from getting the health care that they need.”
the full article at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/16/AR2010011602324.html
Perhaps the RNC should have put out mailers detailing the gruesome sexual assault by a police officer against his 23 month old niece with a curling iron, and the manner in which the Coakley office put off arresting or prosecuting the officer, whose father happens to be a union official. It took the family, through an attorney, to actually get the case the proper handling it deserved, giving the officer two life sentences.
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