Healthy support
A petition drive that would have been doomed without the support of the religious community is ahead of schedule. In 10 days, organizers have collected more than half of the signatures required to place a question on the state ballot that has everything to do with the preservation of the family in Massachusetts.
It is not about gay marriage.
Yesterday 2,500 celebrants at Rosh Hashanah services at Temple Israel in Boston did what hundreds of parishioners at Holy Name in West Roxbury and Our Lady of Lourdes in Jamaica Plain did last Sunday: They put their names to the revolutionary idea that access to affordable, quality medical care is a basic human right.
''Unlike the other petition drive taking place in Massachusetts that is being driven from the top down, this one is growing from the ground up, with support from real people with real stories about real need," said Rabbi Jonah D. Pesner, who directed congregants to six tables at Temple Israel, where signatures were being collected to guarantee healthcare to the more than 500,000 residents of the Commonwealth who are uninsured.
The effort to put universal healthcare on the 2006 state ballot is steaming ahead, even as lawmakers continue to tinker with timider proposals by Governor Mitt Romney and Senate President Robert E. Travaglini to expand, but not guarantee, insurance coverage to those now forced to choose between food and medical care.
''Our goal is to put the brakes on state representatives who just want to do something quickly and go home," Pesner said of politicians caught between the pressure to achieve universal coverage and the resistance to new taxes. ''We want them to do it right."
To help real people with real needs will require real resources, so the ballot question drafted by a coalition of religious and community groups brought together by the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization would raise the cigarette tax, offer subsidies for small businesses that cannot afford to provide insurance, and impose surcharges on larger ones that fail to do so.
''For us, this is a no-brainer; 30 or 40 percent of the people we serve are without health insurance," said Brother Jack Rathschmidt of Our Lady of Lourdes. ''They might go to an emergency room in a crisis, but they go without preventive care. For reasons that I don't fully understand, the church has not jumped in as aggressively on this issue as on some others."
He does not make the comparison, but the contrast with overwrought efforts by the four Roman Catholic bishops of Massachusetts to ban gay marriage is hard to ignore. The hierarchy is so intent on rescinding the civil right of same-sex couples to marry that it is focusing its own petition drive this fall on writing bigotry into the state constitution.
Certainly, it is easier to organize around a polarizing issue than it is to tackle a topic that is ''unbelievably, blitheringly complicated," in the words of John McDonough of Health Care for All, an advocacy group trying to prod the Legislature into meaningful reform. But the grass-roots support for this ballot initiative is a measure of how pressing the healthcare crisis has become.
The laity at Holy Name in West Roxbury gathered 500 signatures, an effort that Monsignor George Carlson said fulfills ''one of the nonnegotiables of our faith: to reach out to the needy. I don't see this as a political issue but as a moral question. Is healthcare a basic human right? A tax cut, at what cost?"
In his sermon celebrating the Jewish New Year, Rabbi Pesner did not mention health insurance explicitly; he evoked images of both the biblical flood and the waters that swallowed New Orleans to underscore a message of shared humanity that is at once religious and political. ''We the people have the capacity to bring on our own destruction," he said. ''So too do we have the potential for a covenantal commitment to the common good."
Amen.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 
