July, 2008

The Bush Administration is reviewing the draft of a regulation that would require hospitals receiving federal funds to respect the religious freedom of health care workers by ensuring that workers do not have to participate in medical procedures that they consider morally objectionable. The regulation is especially concerned with the performance of abortion and the administration of "Plan B" morning after pills, which are considered emergency contraception by some but an abortifacient by others.

Our next president faces a formidable task. He will be forced to deal with two difficult wars, an economic downturn, higher energy prices and a bankrupt federal immigration policy. To some, immigration pales in comparison with the wars and the economy. But for others, especially police departments in border states like mine, it is all-consuming. The first priority of the next president should be legislation that addresses the legitimate concerns of both the people who believe our borders are out of control and those who want equal protection for everyone living in this country.

The Democratic Party for years has yearned for an energetic religious wing. Seeing the power that the religious right brought the Republicans, Democratic leaders realized that if they wanted to build a majority they would need to attract people of faith. Party leaders wanted a religious left and they're beginning to get one - new grassroots organizations, vocal spokesmen, and a candidate conversant in the language of faith. They're also getting a bit of a surprise: religious Democrats aren't so easy to control. Democrats used to routinely lose elections because their most passionate activists cared more about being right than winning elections. On the other hand, several Republican evangelicals such as David Kuo and Cal Thomas have argued that religious conservatives became too concerned about helping the party - and lost their moral compass.

Energy is now the No. 1 issue in the 2008 elections, with both candidates touting new plans to deal with soaring energy prices. Meanwhile, Congress is at a standstill, arguing over the renewal of critical clean energy incentives and a push for more offshore drilling. But above the partisan cacophony is a proposal all Americans can get behind: a new national education initiative to meet the energy challenge. Solving the energy crisis requires large strategic investments to spark a clean energy economy and develop cheap and nonpolluting energy for every American.

Slowly but surely the long-held article of faith that the United States has the world's finest healthcare is eroding in the face of mounting evidence. A fresh report from the prestigious Commonwealth Fund concludes that "despite spending more on healthcare than any other industrialized nation, the US overall continues to fall far short on key indicators of health outcomes and quality." Dig deeper into the report - and look around at other indicators, as well - and it becomes clear that there are important trends in healthcare today which bode well for a future of improved quality.

Nearly a million African-Americans are incarcerated in prisons and jails, and a black male born today has a one-in-three chance of going to prison in his lifetime, if current trends continue. People of good will disagree about the causes of these dramatic figures. Competing explanations include high rates of involvement in crime, differential rates of prosecution through the "war on drugs," racial profiling and inadequate family support. In fact, there is a good deal of documentation to support each of these contentions as at least a part of the explanation for the disparity. While the numbers are distressing, the good news is that there are growing efforts among policymakers at the federal and state level to provide constructive approaches to sort out the causes and address them.

The bipartisan expansion of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) -- along with the President's Malaria Initiative -- is significant in a number of ways. First, it is the congressional affirmation of a major legacy of George W. Bush -- a grand, aggressive international compassion that dwarfs the Peace Corps and is unequaled since the Marshall Plan. Despite charges of simplistic militarism, the Bush Doctrine actually includes three elements: the preemption of emerging threats, the encouragement of responsible self-government, and the promotion of development and health as alternatives to despair and bitterness.

In 2004, the organization "Catholic Answers" distributed voting guides in many parishes. They highlighted five "non-negotiable" items for voters to consider: abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem call research, human cloning and gay marriage. The guide was widely distributed. In 2008, the group Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good have put out a very different voter guide. They list 10 key issues: Dignity of work, economy, environment, education, foreign policy, health care, immigration, Iraq war, life, and poverty.

On July 11, the Ohio Supreme Court set Oct. 14 as the execution date for Richard Cooey for the 1986 rape and murder of two University of Akron students. There has been a self-imposed moratorium for executions in Ohio while lethal-injection cases were pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. Now, we begin again to kill people in Ohio to prove that killing people is wrong. As a Christian and a religious leader, I see no other sane choice than to end executions now.

Three previously classified administration memos obtained last week by the American Civil Liberties Union add to our understanding of how the Bush administration has dealt with torture. The documents are attempts to justify the unjustifiable and to keep those who ordered and carried out this dirty business from being prosecuted and jailed. The memos don't call it torture, of course. The documents refer euphemistically to "enhanced techniques" of interrogation. Changing the name doesn't change the act, however. One memo, written in 2004, specifically makes clear the administration's view that "the waterboard" is an acceptable way to extract information.

Manuel De Jesus Ortega Melendres, a Mexican citizen, entered the United States legally last fall, using a visa valid until 2016 as well as a permit from the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Ortega had every reason to believe he was on the right side of the law, except for one small misstep: being brown in Maricopa County. Maricopa, which includes Phoenix, is home to more than half of Arizona's 6.2 million people. It is also the domain of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is determined to make life miserable for illegal immigrants.

Forty years ago last week, Pope Paul VI provoked the greatest uproar against a papal edict in the long history of the Roman Catholic Church when he reiterated the church’s ban on artificial birth control by issuing the encyclical “Humanae Vitae.” At the time, commentators predicted that not only would the teaching collapse under its own weight, but it might well bring the “monarchical papacy” down with it. Those forecasts badly underestimated the capacity of the Catholic Church to resist change and to stand its ground.

Even for a campaign built on audacity, the boldness with which Barack Obama has picked President Bush's pocket and taken ownership of the faith-based initiative is a bit breathtaking. The effort to open up more federal grants to non-profits and religious institutions is, after all, Bush's signature domestic issue. For eight years, the president has consistently linked the cause to his personal reputation, even boasting during the 2004 campaign that he alone was responsible for changes involving faith-based programs: "Congress wouldn't act, so I signed an executive order. That means I did it on my own." At the last faith-based conference of his presidency in late June, Bush called the faith-based office that he created "one of the most important initiatives of this administration." The words "faith-based initiative" are now so closely associated with Bush that many Democrats long ago assumed the program was fatally flawed. So observers from both parties were surprised on July 1 when Obama declared that his concern about Bush's faith-based office was that it "never fulfilled its promise" — and then neatly pivoted to announce that an Obama administration would fix, expand and elevate the faith-based initiative.

Recent news from Africa continues to be negative. But positive news can be found as well. Ultimately, reform is needed on both the international and national levels. The United Nations has found some success in offering assistance to developing African nations and applying pressure on repressive governments. Its security forces have made a difference in Liberia, Darfur and the Congo. But much depends on whether the G-8 group of nations will live up to its promises of support for debt reduction and assistance with the ongoing AIDS pandemic. In the United States, the Senate's recent approval of the so-called Pepfar reauthorization act, already passed in the House, will also bring some relief by providing funding to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria around the globe.

The child-welfare system is "broken." This harsh indictment has been a constant drumbeat in L.A.-area headlines for years. In the last few months, the tragedy of a 5-year-old subjected to horrifying mistreatment grabbed the public's attention. The pendulum started to swing, and demands mounted to address the crisis. But there are underlying challenges facing struggling families and overwhelmed child-welfare professionals that headlines and an ever-swinging pendulum don't and can't address. Consider just one part of the system: foster care. Los Angeles is home to nearly 30,000 foster youth. We collectively commit to watch over these children when we bring them into foster care, yet too many struggle mightily with the most basic of needs.

With the nation embroiled in a housing crisis, one would expect the Department of Housing and Urban Development to be playing a central role. But HUD is a marginal player. Although its Federal Housing Administration division has agreed to underwrite new mortgages, it is merely following the leadership of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. This is no accident. HUD's sidelined role is a product of its anachronistic approach to both housing and cities. It might be best to simply close the agency and create a new cabinet-level commitment to urban development.

Yesterday, the Matthew25 Network had a conference call with reporters to unveil their plans for the general election. The group is composed of believers who are Democrats and who are "inspired by the Gospel mandate to put our faith into action to care for our neighbor." The group is the brainchild of Mara Vanderslice, who held the thankless job of religious outreach director for the religiously challenged Kerry campaign in 2004, but whose talents at organizing religiously motivated voters has gained the attention of leading Democrats since Kerry's loss.

Last Monday, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, made history by charging the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan el-Bashir, with genocide in Darfur. The pundits argue that el-Bashir will show his anger at the charges by retaliating against civilians, aid workers, and the small, helpless contingent of international troops in Darfur. The result will be, as some members of el-Bashir's regime have menacingly predicted, "more violence," as well as starvation after aid flights are blocked. The displaced populations of Darfur and those trying to help them are certainly vulnerable. Although the killings, rapes, and expulsions that produced 2.5 million refugees in 2003 and 2004 have tapered off, Khartoum's agents are still doing damage, still attacking villages.

Humanae Vitae was a sensitively written expression about the sanctity of marital love and the need to nurture life in marriage written in 1968 by Pope Paul VI. But whatever else it stated, it has been remembered for only one thing: the upholding of the Catholic church's ban on birth control. Less than a decade after the encyclical's promulgation, polls showed it was overwhelmingly rejected by Catholics. Eight out of 10 adult U.S. Catholics simply disregarded it. While bishops were largely upholding the document, many priests in pastoral settings, including confessionals, were saying it was a matter for individual conscience.

Sweeping legislation that offers help for every group battered by the mortgage foreclosure crisis will be voted on in coming days. The bill also includes something for almost everyone to hate. But Congress and President Bush should act quickly to make it law because it should give the nation some needed reassurance and the tools to help stabilize home values. The legislation promises a steady flow of affordable money to encourage banks to offer new mortgages, which are essential to any recovery. And it provides lenders that are willing to take a loss on mortgages they hold a way to avoid financial disaster.

Most health insurance companies exist to make a profit for their shareholders. Profit motives are great when applied to commodities, but health care is not a commodity, and the health insurance market is not good for the health and well-being of Americans. Medicare was established as our taxpayer-supported health care financing system for senior citizens, and it has been a resounding success. The establishment of Medicare HMOs was a perfect experiment to test the hypothesis that the private market could do better. The results are clear: Medicare HMOs cost more and deliver less care than traditional Medicare. It is time to start expanding rather than assaulting Medicare.

The world is in deepening crisis. Food prices are soaring. Oil prices are at historic highs. The leading economies are entering a recession. Climate change negotiations are going around in circles. Aid to the poorest countries is stagnant, despite years of promised increases. And yet in this gathering storm it was hard to find a single real accomplishment by the world's leaders. The world needs global solutions for global problems, but the G-8 leaders clearly cannot provide them. Because virtually all of the political leaders who went to the summit are deeply unpopular at home, few offer any global leadership. They are weak individually and even weaker when they get together and display to the world their inability to mobilize real action.

What dreams do we have for our children? What future do we seek to chart for them? What supports do we endeavor to give them as they transition into adulthood? When we address these straightforward questions for our own children, all of the complexities of reforming the nation's beleaguered foster care system disappear. The answers are self-evident. We want our children to have a good education, a stable, loving environment, and the opportunity to grow into healthy young adults. Our nation's foster children deserve no less.

The next U.S. president needs to urgently rethink America's relationship to Africa. In the past, America has often treated Africa as a backward "Dark Continent," a place bedeviled with poverty, tribalism, AIDS and post-colonial conflicts. Africa is and should be a concern for all Americans- and for the next U.S. president. To be sure, not all of Africa's post-colonial problems have vanished. Poverty is still a serious burden, as are AIDS and malaria in many African nations. But in the U.S., Africa is still often viewed through the lens of the exceptions: Yes, Darfur is a gruesome tragedy, but the conflict there is no longer typical of Africa. In much the same manner, Zimbabwe's faulty election hardly proves that Africa is unprepared for democracy. In fact, Africa is far more democratic today than ever before.

For two weeks in May, Erik Camayd-Freixas, a Spanish interpreter with 23 years of experience and federal court certification, worked nearly round the clock as a translator for almost 400 illegal immigrants snatched in a raid on an Iowa meatpacking plant. His firsthand account describes in shocking detail how prosecutors trampled the immigrants' right to due process and made a mockery of justice. The immigrants, wrote Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, were charged with serious criminal offenses instead of civil immigration offenses. The harsh, mandatory sentences for the offenses railroaded the immigrants, many Guatemalan peasants illiterate in English and Spanish, into pleading guilty to crimes they could not have been guilty of.