MANILA: Senate Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III said sorry to the Kennedy clan for his use of a portion of a speech of the late US Sen Robert F Kennedy in the fourth and last part of his speech against the Reproductive Health (RH) bill.
Sotto admitted copying the text of the Kennedy speech, saying imitation was the highest form of flattery.
“If it upsets the Kennedy family, then I’m sorry. That is not the intention that we had when we used it,” Sotto said.
He made the remark in a privilege speech yesterday hours after a group filed a complaint against him for plagiarism before the Senate ethics committee.
“What seems to be a simple case of probable misinformation has turned out to be misinterpretation and now has become a case of persecution,” Sotto said.
Sotto defended his decision to use a phrase he received via text, which he said he belatedly learned was part of Kennedy’s speech on the Day of Affirmation in 1966 in South Africa.
Sotto had it translated into Filipino, the original of which read: “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history this generation.”
Sotto said Christian leader Derek Ross, of True Love Waits, sent him the inspiring text message.
“When he gave me that line, I translated and delivered the message in Filipino. I found it fitting to what I was fighting for. So I didn’t steal it or claim it was mine,” Sotto said.
“In the words, the worst that they could say is that I copied it. I didn’t really know whom it came from but it was a nice inspirational line. They said the lines came from Kennedy’s famous speech,” Sotto said.
The largest and most active group, Filipino Freethinkers, led 33 other people in calling on the Senate to sanction the senator for supposedly “plagiarising other people’s ideas and works in a series of speeches he delivered on the Senate floor.”
The Philippine Star
