In 1990, GQ magazine ran a devastating profile of Kennedy. Two 16-year-old girls near the Capitol startled by a limo rolling up, the door opening, Ted sitting in the back with a bottle of wine, asking one, then the other, to join. A former aide who acted as Ted’s “pimp.” His penchant for dating women so young that one did not know he was the subject of many books. Kennedy, at a swank DC restaurant with his drinking buddy Chris Dodd, throwing a petite waitress on his dinner table with such force that glass and flatware shatters and goes flying. Then Ted throws her on to Dodd’s lap and grinds against her. He is interrupted by other waitstaff. He is later caught in the same restaurant, in a semi-private area, having sex on the floor with a lobbyist.

In 1991, Kennedy’s nephew William Kennedy Smith is charged with rape. Kennedy Smith had been out drinking with Ted and Ted’s son Patrick at Au Bar in Palm Beach. Kennedy Smith is eventually acquitted, and it’s never proved that Ted had any knowledge of what happened on the Kennedy grounds that night. He remarried, in 1992, and very publicly domesticated himself.

But the tawdriness — the ostensible elder statesmen getting s – - t-faced and picking up women with his son and his nephew; the acquittal won, in part, by shredding the accuser on the stand and in the press; privilege winning out, always — is in such stark contrast to Kennedy’s politics that you have to wonder: Is this really what Kennedy thought of women?

So how is it exactly that so many women, and feminist minded women no less, were able to support and admire someone who engaged in grossly inappropriate, occasionally criminal behavior with younger women while binge drinking?

Ignorance of this record could play a major part at least to young citizens. “I didn’t know about Chappaquiddick and the rape case until yesterday,” Miriam Perez, a 25-year-old editor at Feministing.com, told the NY Post. She said that she admires Kennedy’s accomplishments, but is perplexed. “Like every person, he’s human and there are lots of flaws involved,” she says. “But a big feminist tenet is: The personal is political. So I don’t feel it’s fair to fully ignore it in this case.”

As is largely suspected is the reason so many feminists turned a similar blind eye to Bill Clintons many sex scandals which included allegations of harassment and rape, it is Kennedys 100% consistent record in championing abortion law that could shed light on why Teddy got a pass from women.

Kennedy wrote in a letter to a voter in 1971 that “wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized — the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.” But like many other Catholic liberals, from Joseph Biden to Dennis Kucinich, he moved leftward with his party, becoming a down-the-line supporter of abortion rights, with a voting record that brooked no compromise on the issue.

A review of Kennedy’s unwavering pro-abortion record:

• Voted NO on defining unborn child as eligible for SCHIP.
• Voted NO on prohibiting minors crossing state lines for abortion.
• Voted YES on expanding research to more embryonic stem cell lines.
• Voted NO on notifying parents of minors who get out-of-state abortions.
• Voted NO on criminal penalty for harming unborn fetus during other crime.
• Voted NO on banning partial birth abortions except for maternal life.
• Voted NO on maintaining ban on Military Base Abortions.
• Voted NO on banning partial birth abortions.
• Voted NO on banning human cloning.
• Rated 100% by NARAL, indicating a pro-choice voting record.

Ted Kennedys sister Eunice remained against abortion later in her life, so what made Teddy change? Along with her husband, Sargent Shriver, Eunice belonged to America’s dwindling population of outspoken pro-life liberals. “Like her church, she saw a continuity, rather than a contradiction, between championing the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed and protecting unborn human life.” notes Ross Douthat in a NY Times column asking What if Teddy had opposed abortion?

At times, Ted Kennedy’s fervor on abortion felt like an extended apology to his party’s feminists for the way the men of his dynasty behaved in private. Eunice, by contrast, had nothing to apologize for. She knew what patriarchy meant: she was born into a household out of “Mad Men,” where the father paraded his mistress around his family, the sons were groomed for high office, and the daughters were expected to marry well, rear children and suffer silently. And she transcended that stifling milieu, doing more than most men to change the world, and earning the right to disagree with her fellow liberals about what true feminism required.

It’s worth pondering how the politics of abortion might have been different had Ted shared even some of his sister’s qualms about the practice. One could imagine a world in which America’s leading liberal Catholic had found a way to make liberalism less absolutist on the issue, and a world where a man who became famous for reaching across the aisle had reached across, even occasionally, in search of compromise on the country’s most divisive issue.

Joy challenged Ann on her support for the practice known as “waterboarding” which is a harsh interrogation technique used by US forces on captured terrorists and Al Queda suspects which gives the target the sensation of drowning as water is poured onto their covered face at an angle. Ann fired back on Joys support for abortion, bringing Joy’s waterboarding question into a new light on the obligation a pro-choice advocate has in choosing the action for themselves.

The exchange went something like this:

Behar To Coulter: “You Support Waterboarding… Get Waterboarded!”
Coulter: “You Support Abortion… Abort yourself”