Rev. Rayfield Burns calls for health care reform in Kansas City, Missouri. (Photo from www.piconetwork.org.)

The Religious Left is alive and kicking!

The latest evidence? A group of pastors and priests have launched a national radio ad campaign calling on the government to ensure affordable health care for all.

The ads hit the airwaves today in Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, and Nebraska, and they’re set to continue airing on Christian and mainstream radio stations throughout the Memorial Day congressional recess.

The parties involved might not all self-identify as members of the Religious Left, but their rhetoric has distinct echoes of liberation theology’s call to attend to injustice and need in this world, rather than focus on the afterlife.

This morning Rev. Rayfield Burns of Metropolitan Missionary Baptist in Kansas City, Missouri, told reporters:

Jesus was concerned about more than just the souls of men and women — he was concerned about the whole man. We should be concerned, as well…. We don’t have to become victims of bad government. We don’t have to settle for emergency rooms as a means for taking care of our health care needs.

Gordon Brown of PICO said 586 clergy from 42 states and 38 different religious denominations have agreed to preach on health care in their congregations as part of this campaign. A number of imams are involved in the PICO network, which has also worked closely with the Union for Reform Judaism, he said, but this weekend’s ad campaign is Christian-focused.

It’s a bit frustrating how uncontroversial the radio ads are. The sponsoring coalition (composed of the PICO National Network, Faith in Public Life, Faithful America, Sojourners, Gamaliel Foundation, and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good) has opted not to weigh in on specific policy debates about public vs. private insurance plans, instead issuing a very general call for “affordability.”

Nevertheless, it’s exciting to see pastors lending their charisma to the fight for universal health care, framing it as an urgent moral issue.

The controversy over President Obama’s search for an empathetic Supreme Court judge continues to rage on, with many people arguing that empathy has no place in our justice system.

It all started when Obama announced that he intends to replace Justice Souter with someone who understands that “justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book” but rather about “how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives.” Here’s the sentence that landed him in the fire:

I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.

At this point, numerous conservative leaders have taken high-profile stands against empathy in the courtroom, including Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and John Yoo (the former Justice Department official who drafted the torture memos during the Bush administration).

To me, the most disturbing aspect of the anti-empathy argument is the claim that it’s impossible to simultaneously feel empathy for multiple parties in a conflict. Wendy Long, the legal counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, told Fox News, “If you have empathy for both sides then that’s the same as having no empathy at all.”

For real?

The world would be frighteningly bleak if empathy actually canceled out in this way. The fact that empathy doesn’t cancel out seems foundational to the pain and beauty of life in community.

When two children are fighting, empathy for both sides is what allows a parent to mediate with an eye to reducing harm overall. And in the struggle against domestic violence, empathy for both sides — or in other words, the ability to recognize the humanity, woundedness, and potential for good in all the parties involved — is what enables anti-rape groups to set up functional rehabilitation groups for abusers, even as they channel the rage and pain felt by survivors of abuse.

The harm reduction approach to drug users offers an inspiring model of what empathy-based justice can look like: it calls us to reduce the pain and damage to all parties rather than siding with some and punishing others.

I spent a summer observing custody and domestic violence cases at the Philadelphia Family Court, and it’s clear to me how positive it would be to have empathetic judges in a setting like that. The judges were constantly ruling on ambiguous questions like whether a person was in imminent danger or whether a person was fit to be a parent. They would have reduced more harm if they had actively sought to empathize with all the different parties that came before them. As it was, it seemed that they unconsciously gave more credence to the litigants who were more familiar to them — litigants who looked and talked the most like them — while claiming total impartiality.

Envisioning what empathy would mean at the Supreme Court level is more complicated, since the court is ruling so specifically on the constitutionality of specific policies or actions, rather than on messy family affairs. I haven’t totally worked it out.