A group of Episcopal bishops plan to travel to Washington, D.C., the week of September 14 to lobby on Capitol Hill in support of health-care reform.
The group, “Bishops Working for a Just World,” seeks universal heath-care coverage and solutions to domestic and global poverty and the environmental crisis. Bishops make annual trips to the nation’s capital to advocate for specific legislation or changes to legislation.
“The issues that we lobby are the issues voted on by General Convention,” said Diocese of Newark Bishop Mark Beckwith.
Do their dioceses pay them to go to Washington for marching purposes? I have about zero faith in the value of bishops’ marching.
Senior church leadership directly intervening in the political market-place?
How would that senior leadership like it if a major politician intervened in church politics and/or doctrinal/theological matters?
I think there are times and events when Christians need to step forward and speak to political leaders as Christians. Would most of us argue against involvement in the debate over pregnancy abortion? But, lobbying for change in the currrent health care system may be a prodigal use of the “bully pulpit.”
Reply to #3. who said,
“Would most of us argue against involvement in the debate over pregnancy abortion?”
Those Christians who have spoken out politically as Christians against abortion have been demonized by the ‘left’ to the point where many of the ‘religious illiterates’ have been conditioned to see such Christians as ‘right-wing nut cases.’
However, its a fairly good bet that Christians who speak out in favor of ‘left-wing’ solutions to national health issues will be ‘exalted’ by the ‘left’ and be seen by ‘religious illiterates’ as ‘good’ Christians and this will give an illusionary Christian ‘stamp of approval’ to ‘left-wing’ ideas regarding national health issues.
Thus, these bishops under discussion, will be wittingly/unwittingly supporting a ‘left-wing’ stance regarding national health issues because the ‘left’ will ‘make the most’ out of their lobbying efforts.
Maybe the truth will be indicated by checking on which politicians they communicate with and provide support to during their trip to Washington.
What will their public statements be during the lobbying trip and post-trip?
Of course, the current US system makes you something of a laughing-stock amongst other Western countries: caring enough to help create a more equal society is a Christian virtue, after all. The bizarre thing is that this should even be controversial amongst US conservatives: aren’t you at least a bit ashamed that you spend twice as much, as a nation, on healthcare, than other developed countries, yet achieve far worse results than comparable countries in terms of the health of your people? Trying to rectify that has to be good, surely, rather than something to be snide about?
Fr Mark, # 5: What you write seems reasonable on the surface but is naive in the reality of the details. If there is twice as much spent as other comparable countries, then it is partly because of four reasons: corruption and waste in government-run programs already in place, lack of tort reform, an actual better coverage for those who pay for it and the fact that so much R&D has been paid for by the US insured while other countries have benefitted without paying for a balanced share of the costs of improvements in medical technology.
One thing that is never understood or respected by the Left is that wealth can only be created by work, innovation or exploitation (I’m not talking about exploiting people). It is not created by redistribution. That doesn’t mean that the unemployable shouldn’t be refitted (trained) for a changing job market or if they can’t for health reasons, society shouldn’t cover them. But society has the greatest wealth when people are rewarded for their productivity. When society is productive, that is when government reaps the most taxes to cover the things government needs to do. Good health care is an incentive to get a job and be productive. The economy has been very strained and does not need to take another hit. Obama was elected because he had charisma, the fact that the fear of enemy attack had lessened and that the press gave him a free pass. The majority of the electorate never asked for socialism. Health care should only be pushed forward on the condition that the productive or retired members of society don’t have to give up the quality of care they already have, and that they don’t have to give up a percentage of their retirement nest egg through losses in investment or from inflation. If the bishops understood this fact, they could be more specific as to how government can improve society. I’m glad I don’t live in the other countries you mention. I have friends living in the US who are penniless and have received millions of dollars in health care. What is the real number of citizens who lack health care and how can we fix it without wrecking the better part of what this country already has? Grandstanding for socialism is not the answer.
Cole: I’m not at all left-wing! I just think that a society which is content to see its people suffer worse health care results than other comparable developed societies looks rather callous and selfish from the outside, and callousness and selfishness are not Christian virtues.
Yes Fr Mark, but who is callous and selfish? Subjects like abortion, rationing or end of life discrimination could also be interpreted differently. It depends on whether you are progressive or conservative. I wrote a moderately long previous post, but not long enough to document my argument. One of my main points is that even government welfare has to be paid for out of the economy. The most people that will benefit from welfare (or earning their own way for that matter) will be so if the economy is strong. Right now we have to approach health care from a compassionate but logical way – Not as another unfunded entitlement or socialistic payout for control of the economic second-class citizen’s vote. IMHO, what it means to “love your neighbor†and to be Christian in this respect is to focus on helping those people individually in your own community of contact and to do it by using your own resources as an individual. Not to use that of someone else without their consent. You may be causing more damage to that “someone elseâ€. If the economy tanks, it will damage everyone else. I’m not arguing against some change, it is needed, but against one that the economy can’t support or causes a net loss in all people’s coverage or damage future generations. I’m glad you’re not left-wing!
Cole: these are all arguments against being Christian and compassionate! Being “progressive” or “conservative” has nothing to do with it at all, from a European perspective: we all agree, from all perspectives, that we don’t want the poor in our societies to be de facto condemned to poor healthcare. Isn’t that a bit of a no-brainer? And why on earth is there any need to bring abortion into everything when it is not the issue under discussion?
How it looks to a European outsider is that there are people in the US who avoid the social responsibility of being a Christian, which is to care for the less fortunate and work for justice “for the widow and the orphan” (it is very Old Testament, you know, not invented by Marx!), and yet like to lecture everyone else about how unChristian their societies are. You are so very suspicious of the language of “entitlement”, yet your nation was the first to be founded on the concept of human rights.
It seems very bizarre from outside: America has generally been at its best when go-ahead and liberal, and at its worst when gung-ho and reactionary (think George Bush II). The very concept of “conservative” America is weird to those of us from really conservative, indeed even ancient, nations – it doesn’t ring true to the American spirit, somehow, and results in all these false emphases (like harping on about abortion all the time).
#9: Was it an epic terrible heat spell in France a few years ago when thousands of elderly died? All the people who were suppose to be manning the social network system were off on holiday! That would never happen under the current system in this country. You use language and word meanings differently than I. Yes I think of George Bush II. He was a person of integrity and had an obviously different world view than the most vocal intellectual Europeans. Between the fall of the Third Reich and the fall of the Berlin Wall the US had spent much treasure to protect Western Europe. In most of the last decade the US has spent much of its treasure protecting the world against stateless and state sponsored terrorism. I don’t consider that a vice. Sorry, we obviously have different world views. Let us leave it at that and end the debate.
PS: Abortion is a lot cheaper than childbirth or neonatal hospital care. It is not alien to this conversation of values.
It’s not just that George II had a different world view, Cole, it is that he presented an insensitive and arrogant version of Christian America that repelled the people who would have liked to have been his allies in the world. It was a disastrous period for your standing in the world – and this is what your friends have been telling you: you can imagine how your enemies saw it. That’s what I mean about the conservative religious right agenda in the US at the moment: if followed, it would leave you thrashing about friendless, let alone the way it would muck up your own society. Isn’t the big lesson from the current economic crisis (and indeed, Iraq and Afghanistan) that the world is now too small to be merely national in approaches to problem-solving? That’s the lesson that has been being learned across Europe during the past few decades, and in that area, Europe has moved ahead of the US. Retreating behind the wagons for a shoot-out against the modern world is not a wise policy to advocate: when conservative voices in the US talk as if everyone who espouses decent universal health care is some kind of socialist enemy agent, then that, unfortunately, is the mindset they are playing into: not an intelligent move.
#12: Whatever. No body else is still reading this thread.