Teddy Kennedy: Christianity Demands Higher Minimum Wage

Religious Left Promotes Agenda That Would Foster Unemployment

Sen. Teddy Kennedy (D.-Mass.), spouting the Beatitudes, headlined a press conference last week at which a religious-left coalition argued that Judéo-Christian morality calls for an increase in the minimum wage.

Calling itself "Let Justice Roll," the coalition hopes to leverage what it describes as "moral outrage" over low wages to gain support for legislative action.

Raising the minimum wage, said Kennedy, "is a moral issue of enormous importance and consequence. It's a defining issue about what our society is really about. Whether we reward work, whether we have respect for individuals that work hard and play by the rules, whether we are going to follow the great teachings of the Beatitudes, which inspire so many of us in terms of our responsibilities to our fellow human beings, and if we believe in those fundamental tenets of the Judeo-Christian ethic we cannot fail but to believe that the minimum wage must be a livable wage for all our fellow citizen."

The group's rhetoric is larded with biblical references. Even its name refers to Amos 5:24: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an overflowing stream." In a report produced for Let Justice Roll, Holly Sklar and Rev. Dr. Paul H. Sherry write, "The Golden Rule-the Ethic of Reciprocity-is the most universal moral value, religious and secular. Economics can be immoral: Those with the gold, rule. Do to others anything you can get away with. Or economics can be moral, in keeping with the Golden Rule."

Rev. Robert Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Christ, predicted that traditional Evangelical Christian Republicans will also join the cause.

"The Evangelicals really understand the breadth of the moral issues and one of the key issues that there is no disagreement on is care for the poor," he said, "and my guess is that many of those who are not part of the National Council of Churches, or part of some of the churches who are here, many of those recognize people coming to their churches, living on minimum wage are living below the poverty level and Jesus would be calling us to a justice issue there."

The Let Justice Roll campaign is hoping "every church, every synagogue, every mosque and every temple" will hold "living-wage worship events" on Martin Luther King's birthday.

"This is an issue of morality that cries out for justice ..." said Kennedy. "It just so happens the Republican leadership doesn't understand it."

But what Republicans understand and have tried to explain to Kennedy is that when government arbitrarily raises the minimum wage it does not help lift up workers on the bottom rungs of the employment ladder, it simply throws them off the ladder.

acarpenter@eaglepub.com

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Nov 14, 2005
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