What would Jesus do?
Yay for the nuns! [“Nuns’ support for health-care bill shows church split, Seattletimes.com, March 17]. They’re following the path less traveled in pursuit of clear conscience.
Sister Simone Campbell in an NPR interview said “our perspective is it promotes life by giving 30 million people in our country access to health care when we know that 45,000 people die every year because they don’t have access to health care.”
We are the people who work day in day out with people who don’t have health insurance, with people who can’t get care and with people who are suffering because of the injustice within our system. And for us, the mandate — what we see as the mandate of Jesus in the gospel — is to respond to people in need.
These nuns have asked the question all Christians must ask: What would Jesus do? They’ve not covered their ears, constricted their hearts or shied away when the answer came back loud and clear. You go, Sisters!
— Darcy Wright, Gig Harbor
Baby steps toward ‘historic vote’
“Hurling toward historic vote” [page one, March 19] was the headline in Friday’s Seattle Times. It is bad enough that Seattle has been stuck with a daily newspaper that is much more conservative than the city’s population — The Times endorsed George W. Bush, periodically proclaims “the merits” of doing away with the inheritance tax and condemns the health-care package — but can’t The Times at least separate reporting from editorial opinion?
Are we really “hurling?” This is a health-care debate that has been raging in this country for the past year — to the point that most people are sick to death of hearing about the issue. “Hurling” makes it sound like it has all happened so fast — a view surely held only by insurance-company profiteers and the legislators they have purchased.
Ask the 46 million Americans who live — and die — without health insurance whether the passage of health reform is coming at a blistering pace.
The proper headline should have been: “Finally a vote on health care.”
— Travis Penn, Seattle