Kirkpatrick, others use Katrina’s devastation to again criticize federal budget priorities
The Layman Online, September 23, 2005
Ignored by Congress earlier this year to increase funding for programs they favored, Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick and four other leaders of mainline denominations in the United States are using the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina to again criticize the proposed federal budget which, they say, will “send more people searching for food in cupboards that, quite frequently, are bare.”
Congress was sent a letter Sept. 13 signed by the church leaders who, in addition to Kirkpatrick, were Rev. Frank Griswold, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church; Rev. John Thomas, president of the United Church of Christ; Rev. Mark Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; and James Winkler, General Secretary of the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church.
They repeated assertions made January 25 by a group of more than 60 representatives across denominations – including Rev. Elenora Giddings Ivory, director of the Washington Office of the Presbyterian Church (USA) – in a letter to Congress that questioned whether “the budget of President Bush promotes the common good.”
Written in advance of the February 7 release of the federal budget, that letter warned that, if the denominational representatives didn’t like the funding amounts allotted in such areas as “health care, education, housing, the environment, foreign policy, national security and other issues,” they would “work to transform it into a document that reflects America’s best moral values and who we are as children of God.”
In April, Kirkpatrick, Griswold, Thomas, Hanson and Winkler wrote another letter to Congress in which they complained that the federal budget “continues to ask our nation’s working poor to pay the cost of a prosperity in which they may never share.”
The Sept. 13 letter claims that cuts in programs such as Medicaid and Food Stamps “will in fact have greater burdens placed on them as a result of Hurricane Katrina.” The letter does not address the fact that the federal budget does not cut these social programs but, instead, slows the rate of increase of their funding.
“The devastation wrought by Katrina has exposed the anguished faces of the poor in the wealthiest nation on the planet,” the letter states. “These faces, precious in the eyes of God, cause us to remember that racial disparities and poverty exist in almost every community in our nation. They also compel us to set before Congress once again our concerns for the FY ’06 federal budget and its impact on people living in poverty.”