Ted Kennedy celebrates 16 years of sobriety today

08/25/25 | RonBomb

[E. Pluribus Unum]

I figured Chris had assumed room temperature, but I was wrong. No waitress sandwich today..

[MNJohnnie]

Ohy wow, that is funny

[Vaduz]

And drug free it was his last act.

[FLT-bird]

Amy Winehouse is celebrating 14 years without drugs or alcohol herself.

[logi_cal869]

;-)

Looking forward to future celebrations re the skank from CA.

[Enterprise]

I’ll drink to that!

[californian by choice]

will continue celebrating indefinitely

[jmacusa]

Ted Kennedy was a Catholic like a fish is a bicycle.

[ansel12]

That is your personal opinion, but it is obviously at odds with the Catholic church itself.

Post 11 is a tiny reminder, when you look at the relationship of Ted Kennedy to his Catholic church, both in America and its headquarters in Italy you see that he was perhaps the most Catholic of all Americans during his life.

[DPMD]

I did. And still do.

But not all Catholics, and I believe not the majority of them.

[ansel12]

The Catholic vote has generally gone to the left, not always, but without it the left would have died, even FDR lost the Protestant vote his last two elections.

[jmacusa]

A good Catholic doesn’t commit serial adultery. A good Catholic doesn’t get drunk, and then get behind the wheel with a young woman in the car(not his wife) drive off a dodgy looking bridge into a pond in the small hours of the morning and leave a young woman frightened,trapped,and fearing for her life as the water inched ever higher and the air space shrank.

A good Catholic would have made valiant attempts to rescue the terrified poor girl.

But Teddy Kennedy didn’t do any of that. Joe Kennedy’s boy

wasn’t a good Catholic, and neither was Old Joe.

[ansel12]

See posts 11 and post 69, the Kennedys were Catholic royalty and their political party and the family were and are (as icons and their political legacy) massively effective for the church.

You are judging them as a pew sitting Christian, not as the church leadership does and always has.

“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s.

In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960.
In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin.

After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”