Freedom Federation

Last week I wrote a post based on Dan Gilgoff's article about efforts by Mat Staver and Samuel Rodriguez to moderate the Religious Right's position on immigration reform, noting that both were members of the Freedom Federation, which contains groups like the Eagle Forum who have been vehemently opposed to such reform in the past.

Now, Gilgoff has followed-up on this topic and appears as if Staver truly intends to try and get the Freedom Federation and its members to change their position on this issue:

"There was this rhetoric in the last immigration debate that was, frankly, harsh," says Mathew Staver, dean of the law school at Liberty University, founded by the late Jerry Falwell. "We need to understand that we are still a nation of immigrants, and we need to bring people out of the shadows and make them legal."

Staver, who is leading the effort to bring conservative evangelicals and other religious conservatives on board for comprehensive immigration reform, says he's motivated by biblical principles regarding the treatment of foreigners and by a desire to build bridges between the "pro-family" movement and growing ethnic constituencies. But the campaign may wind up dividing religious conservatives, some of whom helped lead the charge against George W. Bush's failed attempt at comprehensive immigration reform in 2007.

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Now, Staver is trying to build support among Freedom Federation members for comprehensive immigration reform. Part of his goal is to bring Hispanics into the conservative Christian political fold. "The future of the conservative movement is at stake in the debate about immigration reform," says the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, who has been helping Staver lobby conservative evangelical leaders on immigration.

At a recent coalition meeting in Washington, Staver had former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee discuss his immigration views, which have been criticized as soft by many conservatives, with dozens of representatives from religious conservative groups. "Huckabee was attacked in the presidential race because he didn't want to remove educational benefits for the children of illegal immigrants," Staver says. "But that's a biblical concept—you don't punish the child for what his parents did."

And it looks like Staver has his work cut out for him, as the Eagle Forum says it's not budging while other members are still making up their minds:

"Many of our members oppose comprehensive amnesty because of their faith," says Colleeen Holmes, executive director of Eagle Forum, the conservative group founded by Phyllis Schlafly. "But this is really about conservatism versus liberalism, and conservatism says you need rule of law." The Eagle Forum opposes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants ... Some Freedom Federation members, however—like Eagle Forum—remain strongly opposed to comprehensive immigration reform. Others, like Family Research Council Action, are still determining their position.

Considering that many members of the Freedom Federation have openly opposed efforts at immigration reform in the past, Staver's effort to push this issue could end up causing a rift in the movement that, ironically, the Freedom Federation was created in order to heal.

We've written several posts about the new right-wing supergroup known as the Freedom Federation over the last few months.  Consisting of various right wing groups including the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, Eagle Forum, the American Family Association, Traditional Values Coalition, Wallbuilders, Vision America, and many others, the group's mission is to create a unified political front for the Religious Right.

Today, Deacon Keith Fournier writes in Catholic Online that he was recently invited to attend a meeting of the Freedom Federation's steering committee but was reluctant to go ... until he found out that they were going to have a special guest speaker - Mike Huckabee:

I have made some inspiring new friendships with champions such as Rev. Sam Rodriquez and Bishop Harry Jackson. And, it is a joy after several years to renew old ones with my friends Ken Blackwell and Matt Staver. However, the drive to Washington D.C., even with good “beltway traffic” is at least four hours for me since I moved back to Chesapeake, Virginia. I am “swamped” these days, on every front of my life. So, let me be honest. I accepted the invitation because a special guest had promised to drop by and share his thoughts. That special guest is one of my favorite public servants, the former Governor of Arkansas and former Presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee.

I have long admired this genuinely good man. I had the privilege of interviewing him for Catholic Online during the last Presidential campaign. We have published those interviews as related stories under this article. When he entered the meeting, filled with dedicated people (mostly evangelical protestant leaders, though this time I was not the only Catholic) who themselves possess leadership gifts, he filled the room with his presence. Real leaders have a presence about them which just fills the room. His warm smile and attention to every person he greeted was impressive. His warmth toward me made the long drive worthwhile. However, it was his insights, shared over the course of a long and dynamic meeting which convinced me that this is a man who has not even begun to give his gifts to the service of his Nation.

I sat next to the Governor and, I must admit, I invited some of his responses through my own questions and observations. I could say he “had me” when he called my champion, the late Servant of God John Paul II, “one of the great spiritual and Christian leaders of our lifetime” and shared anecdotal stories from the late Pope’s life. However, there was much more to come in the rich content of his intelligent public policy positions. It was the substance of those deeply held positions on the issues which matter most which won the day and only deepened my admiration for the man. He breaks the molds of the empty political labels of “left/right”, “liberal/conservative.” He espouses truly human, just and concerned positions. I will be returning to them, I am sure, in future articles. However, permit me to share just one of his comments.

In the context of discussing the fundamental human rights issue of our age, the right to life from conception, to birth, throughout life and up to and including a natural death - what I call the “whole life/pro-life” position, which the Governor clearly embraces - he said these words: “To say that one person has value, but another does not, that one has human dignity but another does not, or somehow has less… that is the kind of thinking that slavery was built upon, and worse… . The dignity of every human person and the value of every human life must be the pole star of all public policy.” These words are not a slogan, they are a creed to the Governor, a deeply help vision of life and worldview. They flowed from the heart of a man who cares deeply about this nation and about our future together.

Many of the leaders of the Freedom Federation's member organizations backed Huckabee's presidential bid back in 2008, but many others did not, for which Huckabee regularly and roundly blasted them as sell-outs.  Since then, he has been hard at work positioning himself as the Religious Right's most ardent defender and the effort has recently begun paying dividends.

Huckabee continues to insist that he has not decided on whether he will make another run for president in 2012 ... but he certainly seems to be working hard to win over and unify the Religious Right behind him in case he decides to do so. 

As I mentioned before, the right-wing supergroup The Freedom Federation held a press conference yesterday to lay out its position on the healthcare reform debate. Their position? The current system "has problems" but "it is working."

And look at how they explain just how well it is working:

[Harry] Jackson recounted his own diagnosis with esophageal cancer three years ago, and expressed gratitude to have had good insurance coverage.

“I was given about a 15 percent chance of living by the doctors, and at that time we had to choose where we were going to go, and so we were able to go to Johns Hopkins even though it was a little bit of a drive,” he said. “I thank God for the flexibility of . . .the program that we’re on concerning insurance.”

But Jackson explained that some of the treatments he needed were considered “experimental” – treatments he would not have qualified for nor received under proposed evidence-based medicine requirements in the health-care reform bill – a form of rationing.

“If I had waited just a few months to stand in line at a rationed health care process, I wouldn’t be alive,” Jackson said. “Many of my congregational members who needed transplants and other things are deeply gratified and thankful that the system so far has given excellent care to some of them.”

Compare that to what he wrote just a few weeks ago when he recounted the insurance nightmare and massive out-of-pocket expenses he faced as a result of his cancer:

After that initial prognosis, we had a constant tug of war between my family and the insurance company. The insurance company dictated the location of my tests and their costs. This did not seem overbearing until my first chemo treatments were called "experimental" and nearly $10,000 of expenses were racked up in less than two weeks by various additional, preliminary procedures.

It seemed to us that during the first month of my treatment, more hours were spent working on the nuances of the insurance puzzle than actually treating me. My problem was that postponement or denial of treatment meant possible death. I, like thousands of others, could not have survived a six-month delay of the special care Hopkins offered. In fact, if I had been treated at a different local hospital, I would probably not be writing this article. I would not have died from cancer, but of a lack of timely medical attention.

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Today, I am cancer free and am expecting to live a long and meaningful life. The cost of this new lease on life was approximately $100,000 of unexpected personal costs beyond traditional medical costs. The out-of-pocket costs for special food, clothing and preventive health treatments were huge. These numbers also don't begin to reflect the loss of both opportunity and income that the disease inflicted upon my family.

So, Jackson had to fight tooth-and-nail to get his insurance to cover the treatment he needed to survive and racked up "$100,000 of unexpected personal costs beyond traditional medical costs" .... and he uses this experience to argue that we don't need to reform the healthcare system?

Or take this other example from the Freedom Federation press conference: 

[Rick Tyler, the founding director of Renewing American Freedom] explained that under his co-pay agreement with his insurance company, his cholesterol-reducer Lipitor cost him just $15 dollars a month, but decided to “walk the walk” and get a Health Savings Account, one of the proposed free-market health care solutions.

After the cost of his prescription skyrocketed to $139.10, Tyler said he did some research and found he could get a similar statin drug, Zocor, for just $40, if his doctor switched him.

“Since then, I’ve actually switched to Prevastatin, which is available at Wal-Mart for $4 a month,” he said. “Now how does that happen? That happened because I had access to information and consultation with my doctor. All that money I saved, which is a thousand dollars a year, now stays in my health savings account.”

So under his insurance policy, Tyler's co-pay for his prescription was $15.  Then he switched to a Health Saving Account and saw his cost rise to $140 and was forced to switch drugs twice in order bring down the cost.  And this is supposed to demonstrate that that the current system works and doesn't need reform? 

Yesterday I noted that the right-wing supergroup The Freedom Federation had taken its first public position on a policy issue by announcing its "opposition to health care policies that either fund abortion or ration care based on treating life as a mere cost-benefit commodity" and justified its position by citing standard right-wing lies about rationing care and killing grandmothers.

Tomorrow, the group is holding a press conference, presumably so that they can spread these sorts of lies even further:

The Freedom Federation, a cross-section of multi-ethnic and transgenerational Evangelical groups, will hold a press conference to address the impact of health care reform on issues of human life and liberty.

The press conference will be held Wednesday, August 26, at 10:00 a.m. at the National Press Club.

Wendy Wright, President of Concerned Women for America, stated:

"Doctors have earned patients' trust because they've taken an oath to 'do no harm.' Politicians have lost Americans' trust because their health care legislation would harm unborn babies, the elderly, and disabled. What this debate comes down to is that people do not trust the government with their health care decisions."