When you are interviewed by a reporter it's important to be prepared with key messages. These "talking points" should be short and ideally work well as quotes or "sound-bites" that a journalist can use in a story. Here are suggested talking points on important policy issues.
- Our immigration system is broken. We need just and humane comprehensive immigration reform that in a moral and pragmatic way addresses a complex situation that will not be solved with simply talking tough and pouring more money into building security fences.
- The Catholic Church is an immigrant church. As people of faith, our Christian values call us to stand in solidarity with the poor, the marginalized and the strangers among us who are often demonized and abused by hateful speech and inhumane policies. All immigrants deserve to be treated with dignity.
- The root causes of why immigrants risk death to come here require our nation's leaders and those of sending countries to think boldly about how to create a global economy built on human dignity and social justice, not simply market forces.
- Immigrants work hard, pay taxes and contribute significantly to our economy and culture. Without the labor of immigrants, vital industries such as agriculture would suffer. More than 500 economists, including several Nobel laureates, wrote an open letter to President Bush last year reminding him of the overall economic and social benefits of immigration.
- Pope John Paul II called war a "defeat for humanity." Pope Benedict XVI, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and religious leaders from many faith traditions have called for a responsible end to the unjust war in Iraq.
- As people of faith, we call on President Bush to follow the central tenets of his Christian faith and recognize war as a moral failure.
- After four years of war waged under false pretenses, over 3,800 U.S soldiers and over half a million Iraqi civilians have been killed. It's time to recognize that political, diplomatic and economic solutions to rebuilding Iraq must be emphasized over a failed policy of endless war.
- Our troops are fighting bravely as heroes, but our nation's leaders have let them down by putting them in an impossible situation without an exit strategy from the chaos of a sectarian civil war.
- Catholics uphold the dignity of human life at all stages from conception to natural death. Abortion is a grave affront to the sanctity of life. Building a true culture of life requires economic and social policies that help women choose life.
- When we promote public policies that expand pre-natal care, provide social services for mothers and families, and pay workers a living wage we do the hard work needed to help woman and families choose life.
- Catholic social teaching insists that protecting human life also means confronting the silent genocide of poverty, ending war, racism and torture; insisting health care is a human right and caring for the most vulnerable.
- Poverty, war, and humanitarian crises must be addressed if we want to reduce abortions. For example, according to a report from the Iraq Red Crescent, pregnant Iraqi women who have been forced from their homes by violence are obtaining illegal abortions because they are unable to get medical care for themselves and their unborn children.
- Making sure sick children get the care they deserve is a clear moral issue that should not be politicized. Catholics and other people of faith have consistently called on President Bush to support full-funding of SCHIP.
- SCHIP has a 10-year track record of success by providing medical coverage to working poor families who don't qualify for Medicaid. It's a bipartisan response to a profound social need that governors, doctors and faith leaders have all rallied behind.
- Without full-funding of SCHIP, poor children will no longer receive routine check ups that can prevent more serious illness and will have to rely on emergency room care that significantly increases the cost of medical treatment.
- The moral measure of a great nation is not found in the power of its military or even the heights its stock market reaches, but in how we treat the least among us. In the world's richest country, we have the resources to provide health care for all. The question is do we have the will?
