HEALTH CARE
Given our nation’s wealth, the fact that millions lack access to basic health care is a moral travesty. The current health care system is broken – it is too costly and discriminates against those with chronic illnesses – and leaves many without the access that a just society should ensure is available.

The Matthew 25 Network supports substantial policy reform on this front, including legislation to expand affordable coverage to the uninsured and implementing e-technologies to lower administrative costs. We also think that policy-makers should focus heavily on affordable and accessible community health clinics as a major part of the solution to the health care crisis.

See our blog posts on health care and join in on the discussion.

IMMIGRATION REFORM
Loving our brothers and sisters – all of them – represents the core of our moral calling. We recognize that the immigration debate is complex and requires a more just and compassionate approach. We also recognize that the immigration debate has revealed some of our society’s most frightful, underlying racial prejudices and divisions. Therefore, standing with the least of these, the Matthew 25 Network will participate in this debate by actively voicing the immigrants’ untold stories, in order to dispel the myths with moral clarity.

We must seek not only a just but also a humane solution to the immigration debate. Tearing parents from their children, husbands from their wives, and grandparents from their caregivers is wrong and unconscionable. We decry the practice of immigration raids. We believe the practice of coyote running and human trafficking to be profoundly immoral and in drastic need of attention by our law enforcement agencies. Bans on any assistance to undocumented immigrants are inhumane; acts of Good Samaritans often saves the lives of those desiring to enter our country. All persons – regardless of their immigration status – deserve access to basic human services of shelter, sustenance, and access to holistic care.

Too often members of our society forget that immigrants also come from a family, a church, a community. They too deserve to be treated with basic human dignity and respect. Both our policy and ensuing debates need to reflect this.

See our blog posts on immigration reform and join in on the discussion.

PRISON REFORM
One of the most important tests of a society’s character is in its treatment of law offenders. We affirm that justice and compassion are not at irreconcilable odds with each other, and that in a compassionate society that values human dignity, prisons should be clean and safe. As a general principle, the prison systems should serve the purpose of rehabilitation, not punitive confinement for punishment’s sake.

Prison reform must also address our nation’s alarmingly high incarceration numbers. It is a great indictment of our society that we believe the sole solution to many of our problems is to lock up and isolate unwanted elements, particularly when the vast majority of these convicts hail from the powerless and poor, whose voices have been ignored. We need and seek a better approach.

We understand that politically there seems little will for confronting this pressing issue. For this reason especially, we must stand with those considered the least of these in response to this high moral calling.

See our blog posts on prison reform and join in on the discussion.

ABORTION REDUCTION
For far too long our nation’s politics have been destructively divided over the highly impassioned debate over abortion. We, like most of the nation, wish to constructively move beyond these fortified entrenchments that have for decades defined the partisanship that plagues our politics. We seek positive, moral common ground in this debate that will actually reduce the number of abortions in this country. Rather than focusing solely on the legal status of abortions, we must address the very real needs of pregnant women and families.

We need a systemic, common ground, common sense approach. Abortion is a problem long before anyone becomes pregnant. Nearly two-thirds of women who have abortions are poor. Almost half are college-age or younger. Two thirds are single.

We need childcare programs that respond to the needs of working families. We need higher education plans that offer support to mothers – and fathers – who have dreams of supporting themselves and having a career. We need to provide pre- and post-natal care, income support, parent training, and caring adoption programs. By employing a comprehensive and compassionate approach, we can drastically reduce the number of abortions in this country, the first positive step forward on this issue in decades.

See our blog posts on abortion reduction and join in on the discussion.

ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP
Environmental policy has been treated as an afterthought for years by many of our policy makers. This practice must, and seemingly is, coming to an end. We must re-affirm God’s first task for humankind – to be faithful stewards of the earth. Creation, and its resources, are scarce and precious. Denying that fact, no matter how industrious it may seem, could very well be the end of Creation as we know it.

We must act with haste, broad-vision, and conviction to combat climate change and resource depletion. We must invest in a green energy economy, a modernized power-grid, and implement fuel standards. The place these efforts ought to begin is within our own federal government, which is the largest single energy consumer and polluter in the nation. We must address industry’s needs while curbing industry’s polluting output. And, importantly, we must all take individual account of our own environmental footprint. We set aside the false dichotomy between an expanding economy and the environment in order that we may come together for real, tangible solutions to our Creation’s needs.

DOMESTIC POVERTY

INNER CITY INVESTMENT
There is little doubt that our inner cities have long been neglected and underserved by our national public policy-makers. The poor educational institutions, the stagnant economies, and the throbbing need for inner city infrastructure investment are a raw embarrassment to our society, an embarrassment sorely amplified by its contrast to the wealthy urban areas of the same cities.

We push for a massive re-investment in these inner city areas lest we lose another generation to the hopelessness and despair fed by poverty and a sense of abandonment. This investment needs to be directed towards infrastructure, schools, and social services. We believe this not only to be a moral imperative but also that there could be few better investments towards the success of our nation’s future.

See our blog posts on inner city investment and join in on the discussion.

RURAL INVESTMENT
As more and more migrate to urban and suburban areas of the country, rural counties across the country have often been left to stagnate by our public policy makers. As money, jobs, and human resources flow out of these regions, economies quit growing and distances widen between resource hubs. Schools are unable to attract quality teachers due to budget constraints, and students lack the public resources more easily accessible in urban areas.

We urge action towards making sure that these rural areas around our country bloom rather than whither. We must work to keep rural careers as a live option for the youth growing up in rural communities and work to make sure that rural students have the same opportunities and quality education afforded elsewhere. We also need to make sure that rural areas have access to health care clinics. While some unpleasant changes are inevitable, we must at least make sure that these communities are not forgotten.

See our blog posts on rural investment and join in on the discussion.

RETOOLING FOREIGN ASSISTANCE
The call to care for the least of these must go beyond our own borders. While our society’s injustices are real and serious, and must be a main focus of ours as responsible citizens, we cannot ignore the plights of poverty, hunger, and disease in other parts of the world. We enthusiastically support U.S. foreign assistance in these areas.

However, we also consider the foreign assistance programs to be in considerable need of improvement. U.S. aid is often purposefully inefficient, tying U.S. aid to U.S. interests rather than to aid effectiveness. Lack of long-term thinking and failure to have proper accountability measures in place have also further propagated the ills of corruption and foreign dependency. We support retooled and innovative approaches such as the Millennium Challenge Corporation that stress effectiveness and accountability.

See our blog posts on foreign assistance and join in on the discussion.

CIVIL RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES
America’s history concerning civil rights and liberties is both a source of great pride and a source of great shame. While we have bravely fought to expand the rights of persons, we have also too often denied rights to those who have the least and those who we consider different from ourselves. Our faith has been a great motivator in many of the most important historic struggles; yet, it has also been the means by which we rationalize the denial of rights to other persons.

The Matthew 25 Network’s task concerning civil rights and liberties is two-fold. We must be loud advocates for the protection of those at the margins and those who have the least. And we must call upon our Christian brothers and sisters to act in humility to those who differ from ourselves – to not use our faith as a means to deny anybody the same rights we enjoy.