I was very interested in the letter published in Sunday’s Salisbury Post by James Saleeby where he commended the Lutherans of North Carolina, acting in Synod, for passing a resolution calling for Medicaid expansion in North Carolina. At the end of his letter he said he hoped other Christian denominations would follow suit.
I am a retired elder in the Western North Carolina Annual Conference. In June of 2013 I wrote a similar petition and it was passed by our Annual Conference. However, other than sending the petition to the governor and to members of the General Assembly, nothing else really was done under the leadership of Bishop Larry Goodpaster.
After about eight months I received an email from the conference secretary about the petition and was told that she had received only five responses, all negative, all from Methodist representatives who threatened to resign from the Methodist Church because of the petition.
I hate to dampen Mr. Saleeby’s hope, but unless the leadership of the Lutheran Church in North Carolina gets involved in doing something about helping the 500,000 poor North Carolinians to get Medicaid, and stay involved, do some agitation, their petition will be as useless as mine.
The fact of the matter is that every representative in Raleigh claims to be religious, even the ones who deny help to the poor. The problem is that the right wingers believe President Obama is of the devil, and anything attached to him, like the expansion of Medicaid for the poor, is of the devil.
I personally think those right wingers are delusional. But I suppose they think I am as well.
Rev. William Barber, the leader of the N.C. NAACP is the true model for getting Medicaid expansion for North Carolina. His Moral Mondays expose the small minds and smaller hearts of the representatives in the General Assembly who are blocking the expansion of Medicaid. The only solution to the problem is to vote them out.
As president Obama says often, “Don’t boo, vote!”
— Mark Denton
Cooleemee