Seeking the Common Good through Public Policy: Justice leaders Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Harriet Tubman portrayed at Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington D.C.

By Gary E. Maring

The concept of “the common good” is central to many religious faiths and goes hand in hand with the Golden Rule of doing unto others as we would want done unto ourselves.
Gary E. Maring, a longtime advocate for social justice, explores the concept of the common good in detail in this book, focusing on basic necessities such as a place to live, food to eat, access to
education, employment, health care, and human dignity.

He also takes our leaders to task, asking questions such as:
• Do their policies support the needs of everyone?
• Are they acting in the interest of our children and grandchildren?
• Do they support the biblical concepts of compassion for the disenfranchised and The Golden Rule, which is common to most faiths?

After four years of a Presidency that sought to divide rather than unite Americans, the nation finds itself deeply conflicted but the author sees sprouting seeds of hope for a better future that embraces all Americans. Increased advocacy for justice and the common good will play a central role in forging a better future for all.

Join the author as he seeks common ground and ways we can work together to promote the common good through public policy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781667159300

Book preview

Seeking the Common Good

through Public Policy

Justice leaders Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day,

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Harriet Tubman portrayed at

Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington D.C.

GARY E. MARING

Copyright © 2021 Gary E. Maring.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored,

or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical,

or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the

case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized

reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-6780-8965-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6671-5930-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021901475

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977,

1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. All rights reserved.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 03/09/2021

Seeking the Common Good

through Public Policy

With a case study on ending long-term

homelessness in the nation’s capital

Gary E. Maring, February 2021

In this book, Gary Maring shares a vital message for our times and a compelling vision for our common good. Maring offers us an informed and realistic perspective on social justice which is inclusive of all persons and accountable to our history. As one of the founders of the N Street Village (NSV) programs nearly 50 years ago, Gary has a long history of advocating for and helping found programs serving those who are impoverished or homeless. He has served many years on the Board of NSV and in recent years on the DC Ineragency Council on Homelessness’ Strategic Planning Committee. In this book, he provides a special focus on efforts to end long term homelessness in Washington DC and the role of NSV in addressing the particular challenges of women who are homeless here in our nation’s capital. Maring’s personal work and experience combine herein with his considerable intellect and rigorous research to offer readers a meaningful moral compass and a practical policy pathway pointing us all toward true common good.

Schroeder Stribling

CEO, N Street Village

http://www.nstreetvillage.org

Gary Maring, is a part of the congregation I serve in DC, Luther Place Church, where for over 50 years, he has been a congregational leader and a social justice advocate. In this book, Gary discusses the important concept of the ‘common good’ where all members of the community receive sustenance and human dignity. The common good is central to the tenets of many religious faiths and remains imperative in our challenging times of COVID-19 where so many are suffering. Gary has been instrumental in helping found several key social justice programs at Luther Place over the decade — N Street Village, now DC’s largest program for homeless women, the national Lutheran Volunteer Corps, and the Steinbruck Center. Additionally, over the long term, Gary been engaged in community organizing through interfaith justice coalitions in the DC area. Gary regularly organizes with the Washington Interfaith Network with its focus on housing and jobs, the Congregation Action Network which advocates on immigration policy and he participates in the Poor People’s Campaign which continues the economic justice work started by Martin Luther King, Jr. some 57 years ago. We are grateful for the ways Gary bears witness to his faith and the common good in public life!

Pastor Karen Brau

Luther Place Memorial Church

Washington, DC

About the Author

Gary Maring is a member of Luther Place Memorial Church, a progressive Lutheran church in Washington, DC, only blocks from the White House, which has served the nation’s capital for nearly 150 years. He is among the key founders and a board member of N Street Village, a continuum of programs and supportive housing for women who are (or have) experiencing homelessness in DC, and he serves on the DC Interagency Council on Homelessness’ Strategic Planning Committee. Mr. Maring is also a founder of the national Lutheran Volunteer Corps, which places yearlong volunteers in social justice agencies in DC and multiple cities around the United States. He is also among the founders of the Steinbruck Center at Luther Place Church which hosts groups participating in experiences related to justice, education, service, and community engagement including college alternative breaks, protests and activism, conferences, and more. He has been a longtime advocate for social justice and the common good in the public policy arena. He writes a regular blog on social justice and public policy, which can be viewed at http://gary-maring.blogspot.com. He is president of Maring Publishing: The Common Good and Public Policy, LLC, in Maryland, the entity under which he publishes blogs, books, and articles. His professional career was in transportation policy in the federal government, which helps him understand the challenges of formulating national policy and legislation that he discusses in his book with regard to justice issues.

Acknowledgments and Dedication

I dedicate this book to my dear wife Margaret and to our beloved children and grandchildren. I also want to offer special acknowledgment to the remarkable pastors of Luther Place Memorial church in DC who so influenced my life over more than fifty years, i.e., Jim Singer, John Steinbruck, Bob Holum, and my current pastor Karen Brau. They taught me the key justice messages of the gospel. Two important gospel messages that particularly inspired our justice work at Luther Place were ‘welcoming the stranger’ and caring for the disenfranchised or ‘least of these’. Finally, I want to pay tribute in memoriam to my longtime friends and mentors, Dale McDaniel and Chuck Solem, who served tirelessly over many decades to support justice work at Luther Place church and N Street Village programs for homeless women.

Preface

I am increasingly drawn to the concept of the common good, which to me means a society where everyone has access to the basic necessities of life—a place to live, food to eat, and access to education, employment, health care, and human dignity. The concept of the common good is central to the tenets of many religious faiths and closely related to the principle of the Golden Rule, i.e., doing unto others as we would wish done unto ourselves. Seeking the common good implies that all members of a society should have reasonable access to its benefits and enjoyment. Our country embeds this concept in the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I generally apply a few simple tests to help discern whether our leaders and their policies are just and supportive of the common good:

1. Are our elected leaders and their policies supportive of the needs of all segments of society?

2. Are our elected leaders and their policies acting in the interests of my children’s and grandchildren’s future?

3. Do the leaders and their policies support the biblical concepts of compassion for the disenfranchised and the Golden Rule, which is common to most all faith traditions?

In my previous book, Faith, Social Justice, and Public Policy: A Progressive’s View, I explored the interrelationships between faith and social justice and how those concepts relate to public policy.¹ In this book, I go deeper into these concepts, particularly the theme of the common good and how it affects local and national public policies. I discuss methods that have been and are being used to translate these concepts into policy that is more just for all of society’s members.

Although major human rights movements have brought significant economic and social gains in recent decades for women, people of color, and sexual minorities, those victories also carried with them a backlash. Such pushback is seen particularly from some in the white working-class, who, while having some legitimate economic grievances, unfortunately tend to blame the rise of minorities, immigrants, and women for their diminished economic status. The "Let’s Make America Great Again" political campaign theme in 2016 and 2020 implied restoring predominant white male privilege of decades ago and diminishing upward mobility for minorities and women. Of course, no politician will be able to restore the old economic order given our twenty-first-century global economy, ongoing technological innovation, and the hard-won civil rights and workplace antidiscrimination laws that are now in place.

At this time in our history, more than ever in my lifetime, I believe we are called to stand up to forces trying to roll back decades of social justice accomplishments in areas such as civil rights, health care, voting rights, racial justice, gender equity, income equality, environmental justice, immigration, and the like. When minority groups are publicly denigrated by our leaders and made to feel fear for their families, then we must resist. We can learn from past and current human rights movements like abolition, women’s suffrage, civil rights, freedom to marry, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and others. I had planned to release my book in the spring of 2020 but paused as the pandemics of COVID-19 and racial injustice quickly emerged through the year. Just before my book publication, the country witnessed the election of a woman of color as Vice President of the United States, a truly historic event that gives hope to many in our society who have been disenfranchised. I have attempted to capture the profound events and common good lessons from this tumultuous period in our history and offer some modest insights regarding our path forward knowing the journey will be long.

On a mural on a door of our church Luther Place in DC as pictured on the cover, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminds us that we must walk together and always march ahead; and as he frequently cited from a portion of a sermon delivered in 1853 by the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Introduction

During the last century, America has seen unparalleled improvement in our economic and social conditions, but much remains to be done. The Industrial Revolution was emerging in the late nineteenth century, but market forces were also causing significant negative social conditions in what was often referred to as the Gilded Age. This helped spur a period of social activism and reform, resulting in major social justice accomplishments in the first half of the twentieth century such as workplace regulations (e.g., child labor laws), fair wages, women’s suffrage, government reform and civil service, social security and unemployment measures, industrial reform and regulation, environmental conservation, and more.

President Theodore Roosevelt (1901–09) challenged the Gilded Age inequities and was a key champion of the environmental conservation movement. Roosevelt developed a philosophy that became known as the Square Deal, which expanded the government’s regulatory powers to curb excesses that had emerged in the marketplace but also championed government reform to improve its effectiveness. The forces set in motion by Theodore Roosevelt were further built upon by subsequent presidents, in particular, his cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose New Deal then led to unparalleled economic growth and social well-being in the post–World War II period. This was followed by the Great Society, a set of domestic programs launched by President Johnson in the mid-1960s spurred by the Civil Rights movement. Key goals of Johnson’s efforts included addressing poverty and racial injustice. New major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, and transportation were launched during this period, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964–1965 addressed racial disparities. Medicare and Medicaid were enacted during this period also. When environmental concerns emerged because of unprecedented post–World War II industrial growth and greatly increased automobile travel, environmental activism and legislation emerged, including the 1963 Clean Air Act, the 1972 Clean Water Act, and the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act, along with creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). These initiatives drew broad bipartisan support.

Unfortunately, in recent years we have seen pushback against some of these policies and have witnessed growing economic inequality, racial tensions, anti-immigrant sentiments, and political polarization. We see economic and social distress in many Rust Belt communities due in part to loss of manufacturing and extractive industry jobs caused by technology and globalization. Further, our country’s demographics are changing, and this is unsettling to many whites, particularly in more rural states and communities. Both the economic and the social unrest drove many in these communities to vote for what they saw as a candidate who would bring change in the 2016 presidential election. Unfortunately, the resulting change has too often been counter to the common good as will be discussed herein. Now, as we enter 2021, the nation witnessed an important political transition with incoming President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. The last days of the Trump administration, including the white supremacist assault on the Capitol, was one of the worst periods in American history and will leave an indelible stain on our democracy. So many immediate challenges face the new Biden administration, most notably COVID-19 and related health care and economic displacement issues. They have many proposals for new health, economic, racial equity, immigration, environmental policies and importantly bringing a deeply divided country together. This will all be a huge challenge, but the Biden administration has assembled a very experienced and diverse Cabinet and now with control of Congress they hope to move aggressively to implement needed change.

The COVID-19 pandemic painfully reminded us of the deep inequities in our society and the need to find common ground in addressing our emerging economic, social, and environmental challenges. Kay Coles James, founder and board chair of The Gloucester Institute and president of the Heritage Foundation recently commented that, We are all in the same storm but not all in the same boat…Some are in yachts, some are in rowboats, and some are barely staying alive with a life jacket. The COVID-19 crisis laid bare the systemic inequities and structural racism that many persons and communities experience daily. Many hope that the twin pandemics of 2020 will lead to new policies and legislation addressing continuing racial and economic disparities in our nation.

This book is focused on a simple but particularly important concept, the common good, which I discuss further in the next chapter. A deeply related moral principle is even more familiar to us—the Golden Rule, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In national surveys, nearly 90 percent of the US population say that they believe in the Golden Rule as an important guiding principle in their lives, yet we are in one of the most polarized periods in my lifetime. We too often see hate language pervading our public dialogue. We see anti-minority, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-gay, and racist attitudes too often entering our public discourse. At the same time, we still witness great inequalities in our social order worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Following are some, but not all, of the key social and economic justice issues of the day that are significant detractors to achieving the common good in America.

Economic inequality—Economic inequality has received increased attention in recent decades. In September 2019, the Census Bureau reported that in 2018 income inequality in the United States had hit its highest level since the bureau started tracking it more than five decades ago.² Census data showed that in 2018, more than half (53 percent) of all money income went to the wealthiest fifth of the population. And in 2020, the sudden emergence of the coronavirus further devastated low- and moderate-income workers in particular. A disproportionate number of minorities are front line workers, and this factor has been a significant contributor to the much higher COVID-19 infection and death rates among Blacks and Latinos.

Poverty and homelessness—The US poverty rate declined modestly in the last few years before COVID-19, but in 2019 it was only slightly below the level of 2007, right before the Great Recession pushed millions of Americans out of work and into financial distress. About 34 million Americans lived in poverty in 2019 and it was more prevalent among African Americans and Hispanics. Then in 2020 our nation suffered another recession due to COVID-19 and millions more have likely been pushed into poverty. Recent research on the impact of living in poor neighborhoods shows that the negative effects extend across generations, which demonstrates that neighborhood inequality that exists in one generation is commonly transmitted to the next. This and other factors causing intergenerational poverty and persistent disadvantage impede individuals’ ability to achieve the American dream. Recent analysis by the National Low-Income Housing Coalition has found that a full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour cannot rent an affordable (30 percent of one’s income) two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country.³ Further, such low-income individuals and families living on the margins are vulnerable to unexpected crises like COVID-19, which can leave them destitute and possibly homeless.

Racial justice—In recent years, the nation has seen a surge in white nationalism, voting restrictions, and gerrymandering that often disadvantage African Americans and other minorities, and increased racially motivated violence. In 2020, we have sadly witnessed the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus pandemic on minorities followed by multiple high-profile police killings of African Americans which resulted in nationwide protests led by Black Lives Matter (BLM). Major pressure has built for police reform, but more broadly to address systemic racism in America. In recent decades, mass incarceration has disproportionately taken Black men out of the job market, disqualified them from benefits such as food stamps, increased their risk of homelessness, and increased their chances of reincarceration. And with this high rate of imprisonment of Black men, already vulnerable Black families and the women who sustain them have been plummeted into greater poverty and stress when their loved ones are incarcerated.

Gender and family issues—Work–life balance is a top workplace concern for women in America, followed by family leave, childcare issues, and pay equity. Both men and women work more hours than in other developed countries with fewer family benefits (such as sick/family leave and childcare). The lack of these benefits has been vividly revealed during the coronavirus outbreak. Sexual harassment has emerged as a national concern, and we have witnessed a broad social media movement known as #MeToo as part of an awareness campaign to illustrate the pervasive sexual abuse and harassment that women have experienced and still experience. The pandemic has further laid bare the lack of family leave benefits and the challenges of childcare with the heaviest burden falling on women.

Gay rights—The 2015 Supreme Court decision supporting marriage equality was a milestone accomplishment after advocates had built the case through many legal challenges at the state and local levels over the previous decade and more. This has resulted in pushback from some religious groups that want religious exemptions that would effectively allow discrimination based on sexual orientation. Importantly, in June 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that the 1964 civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination.

Immigration—The recent anti-immigrant trends are certainly not the first emergence of nativism in the United States against immigrants. Back during the founding years of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln strongly challenged the nativism coming from the likes of the Know-Nothing Party. Similar sentiments emerged in the early twentieth century under President Wilson. In recent years, we have again seen pushback on immigration at a time when we need immigrants to help build a future workforce; the natural birth rate in the US and in European countries is not high enough to produce a sufficient future workforce. Clearly, our immigration system needs reform, but building walls on the borders to keep immigrants out is not the answer, although it paid politically to certain base instincts.

Health care—The Affordable Care Act (ACA), enacted in 2010 with President Obama’s leadership, has reduced the number of uninsured people by more than 20 million, and it has concurrently increased access to primary care, needed surgeries, medicines, and treatment for chronic conditions. As a result, according to studies conducted at Harvard University, the ACA is saving tens of thousands of lives each year. Unfortunately, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress persistently attempted to undo this long-sought expansion of health coverage without any plan for what would replace it. Despite the success of the ACA, nearly 30 million Americans are still without health coverage, and costs are higher than in other, comparable countries. With the coronavirus pandemic having caused more than 500,000 American deaths, health care has emerged as a priority issue for the country and has highlighted the importance of quickly moving to universal health care. Instead, the Trump Administration and Republican state attorneys general brought yet another ACA repeal case before the Supreme Court for hearing in late 2020. This was truly an insane policy in the midst of a catastrophic health crisis.

Voting rights—Here in the