Faith leaders from around the country have joined in civil disobedience to protest the attacks on healthcare in Congress, as the Senate continues to see-saw back and forth on whether it will or will not attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis of the Kairos Center was one of those leaders, and is also part of the new Poor People's Campaign, which aims to link political attacks on the right to vote with the material conditions of poor and working people across racial and geographic lines across the U.S.

LT: I think that part of why we see it as really important for faith leaders to step up in this is because healthcare and all of these issues are moral issues, for too long morality has been confined to a very small number of issues, many of which are barely discussed in faith traditions and texts, and they've been in the hands of folks that are trying to exclude and oppress. And instead, we're saying that if you look at various religious texts within the tradition of Christianity that I come from, Jesus traveled around the countryside healing people for free. Clearly Jesus had a universal healthcare system, but in this time, in this moment, these kinds of healthcare cuts, this kind of repeal of the ACA is all being done in the name of and with the support of many Christians and politicians who claim to be Christian.
And so it's really important for faith leaders to say no, this is a moral issue, it's a moral issue whenever you kill people because you deny them Medicare and Medicaid, whenever you deny people healthcare because they have preexisting conditions, that this is not OK in any of our sacred texts and it is a responsibility of everybody, including our moral leaders, our clergy, to not just talk a good talk but actually to be out there with people who are impacted fighting for the kind of healthcare system that we we want.

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