Scott Brown's major campaign strategy for the final week of the race has been to decry any and all exploration of his political record as personal attack, and he's been aided by a media that's buying it. Unfortunately, now he's also been aided by the Massachusetts Democratic Party, which sent out a mailer making an inflated claim about a very real issue. The mailer says:
1,736 WOMEN WERE RAPED IN MASSACHUSETTS IN 2008. SCOTT BROWN WANTS HOSPITALS TO TURN THEM ALL AWAY.
TPMDC reports that:
Over the weekend, Brown's campaign said they would file a criminal complaint, under a state law that forbids false statements against political candidates. "People can shade things and spin things, but it has to have some kernel of truth," said Brown campaign counsel Daniel Winslow.
Don't expect the criminal complaint to go very far. As a general rule, civil and criminal complaints filed over campaign attacks don't result in much, because the courts are loathe to get involved in policing the rough and tumble of political debates. To penalize campaign speech would create a chilling effect that would intimidate future campaigns, so an attack would have to be really bad and really false to merit legal penalties.
Filing a criminal complaint is campaign showboating; ignore that. But the MDP's misstep has given people who never understood the issue and wanted to dismiss it an excuse to say that Brown's amendment was never a problem to begin with. So now we have to revisit this.
The Massachusetts Senate was considering a bill that would have required emergency rooms to provide emergency contraception to rape victims. Scott Brown tried to insert an amendment to allow medical personnel to refuse to do so if they had a religious objection. This is fact.
Brown would like us to think that under his amendment no woman who had just been raped would ever have been denied emergency contraception, that if one person in the emergency room said no, someone else would do it. But there isn't always someone else, and under Brown's amendment some women would have had their trauma magnified by being denied care, and would have been faced with the choice of finding another hospital, or waiting hours for a treatment that is less effective the longer you wait for it.
There's another angle that's immensely important to understand. Brown's religious belief exemption sought to propel a myth about emergency contraception: namely, that it's abortion. Radical opponents of contraception want people to confuse emergency contraception with the "abortion pill" as part of a foot-in-the-door strategy to chip away at the availability of contraception. First they come after emergency contraception, something used relatively rarely and under special circumstances, then the logic that created conscience exemptions for that gets extended to hormonal contraception such as the Pill. However many or few women would have ended up not getting emergency contraception after being raped, Brown's amendment has to be understood as a part of this broader campaign to expand the range of what's thought of as abortion and to limit available contraceptive options. That's culture wars stuff right there.
And if you don't want another senator fanning the culture wars, work to get out the vote against Scott Brown.