“Last lion” is how Peter Canellos characterized Sen. Edward Kennedy, in the title of a new book he and a team of Boston Globe reporters wrote earlier this year.
The book is aptly named. Indeed, Sen. Kennedy was known as the lion of the Senate for much of his nearly 50 years of Senate service. The adjective “last” signals his uniqueness — his once-and-onlyness. The book is also subtitled with a clever twist: “The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy.” As the subtitle suggests, Kennedy finished strong after some well-chronicled missteps. Other senators have served longer and to an older age, but they usually have gone out with the muted meow of a house cat. Kennedy roared like a caterwauling lion until the end.
Sen. Kennedy will be remembered for his prolific legislative work on issues such as health care, education, economic/social justice and civil rights writ large. He was a natural legislative leader. It has been said that Kennedy could be “ideological without being an ideologue.” He could, at the appropriate time, bend as well as bluster. Kennedy was also a fierce defender of religious liberty and a champion of the separation of church and state.
As he did on other matters, Kennedy worked both sides of the aisle on church-state issues. Along with his ideological alter ego, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Kennedy spearheaded the charge to pass the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (“RFRA”) in 1993 — maybe the most important piece of religious liberty legislation in the past quarter century. Kennedy and Hatch, of one mind on this issue, gave a critical political cover to the rest of the Senate, and RFRA passed with a vote of 97-3.
When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down RFRA in City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), Sen. Kennedy responded quickly and forcefully, declaring “this decision cannot be allowed to stand!” He then led the way, again with Sen. Hatch, for the consideration of the Religious Liberty Protection Act and, eventually, the passing of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (2000) to rectify some of the damage done by the Court to the Free Exercise Clause in Boerne.
Sen. Kennedy cared about Establishment Clause values, as well as Free Exercise. He fought tooth and nail the efforts to institute voucher schemes that aimed to funnel tax dollars to private and parochial schools. A staunch defender of public schools to be sure, he understood also that using public funds to pay for the teaching of religion offended even the most modest understanding of the separation of church and state.
One of my favorite Kennedy quotes concerning religious liberty comes from his speech delivered in 1983 on the campus of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. (Falwell’s inviting Kennedy to Liberty itself is an interesting story.) Among other things, Kennedy declared to the Liberty assembly:
The separation of church and state can sometimes be frustrating for women and men of
religious faith. They may be tempted to misuse government to impose a value which they
cannot persuade others to accept. But once we succumb to that temptation, we step into
a slippery slope where everyone’s freedom is at risk. Those who favor censorship should
recall that one of the first books ever burned was the first English translation of the Bible. . . .
Let us never forget: today’s Moral Majority could become tomorrow’s persecuted minority.
This lion has roared for the last time. However, I trust that whether one embraces Sen. Kennedy’s political views or not, we can all be inspired by his penchant for speaking the unvarnished truth as he saw it, while, at the same time, extending a hand of compromise and a spirit of civility to those who disagreed with him.
This 1998 photo shows Brent Walker, Sen. Ted Kennedy and Sen. Orrin Hatch participating in a 1998 press conference on the Religious Liberty Protection Act in front of the U.S. Capitol. Kennedy and Hatch were the senate sponsors of the bill. For more photos, visit the BJC's Flickr photostream.
