Stop health care reform violence

This installment is a preface to the statement issued on Friday, March 26, 2010 by the YWCA Great Lakes Alliance, the region to which the YWCA of Greater Milwaukee belongs. Since it was drafted, others have come forward to articulate a similar position.

Debate on the health care bill, now LAW, should be behind us. We need to focus on creating jobs, insisting that banks put earnest effort into helping people avoid foreclosures, finding cost-effective alternative fuel sources, researching cures to the diseases that kill or cripple thousands, improving public education, etc., etc. Each of these things is equally as important.

MOVE ON!


GLA Statement
The YWCA Great Lakes Alliance calls for an end to the vitriolic reactions to health care reform. Threats, epithets, and violence are unacceptable responses in a peaceful democratic society, and we condemn them. Further, the YWCA believes that this outrage is a veiled covering for underlying racially-motivated anger.

We believe that health care reform is being used as a platform to legitimize an expression of racial hatred. Responses to the passage of this legislation, which have included illustrations of nooses, threats of violence against our elected leadership and their families, and vandalism of property are not normal reactions to even controversial legislation. This extremist reaction is reminiscent of the violence of the civil rights era.

These messages only divert us from the critical problems we face as a nation.

The YWCA urges civility and challenges our communities to examine these violent reactions and the motivation behind them.