Leadership Quote by Edward Kennedy

Kennedy is doing something more surgical than disagreeing with the Moral Majority; he is disputing its right to frame the argument before anyone else speaks. By targeting the name, he spotlights branding as politics: “Moral Majority” isn’t a neutral label but a preemptive claim that converts policy preferences into a referendum on decency and belonging. If they are the moral ones, opponents aren’t merely wrong; they’re suspect. If they are the majority, dissenters aren’t fellow citizens; they’re fringe.

The sentence is built to expose that rhetorical trap. “Not only...but” lets him concede that their views are contentious while pivoting to the deeper problem: the movement’s self-anointment. He’s warning that language can launder power. A group can be a faction and still speak as if it were the nation’s conscience.

The timing matters. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Moral Majority rose as a religious-right force in American electoral politics, aligning with conservative causes on abortion, school prayer, and “family values,” and helping reshape the Republican coalition. Kennedy, a leading liberal Democrat and a Catholic with his own moral vocabulary, is pushing back against the idea that one religiously inflected agenda owns the word “moral.” His subtext is pluralism: in a democracy, moral reasoning is contested, coalitions are temporary, and majorities are not proof of righteousness. The real controversy, he implies, is a movement trying to turn political disagreement into moral disqualification.