Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

(Austin)—Leaders of the United Methodist Women of Texas voted this week to pursue a legislative agenda based on “faith in the future.” Topping their list of priorities are expanding health care to one million Texas children and funding public education at or above the national per-pupil average. The group also voted to support proposed clean energy and criminal justice reform packages.

More than 150 United Methodist Women met for three days at the 17th annual Texas United Methodist Women’s Legislative Event, a conference bringing together leaders of Texas’ six regional United Methodist bodies. An overwhelming majority called for establishment of a state personal income tax conforming to the specifications of the Bullock Amendment as the most fair and effective way to fund public education.

Mary Beth Gibson of Lexington said, “We know that the notion of an income tax is not well-loved and even less well-understood, but we are failing the children of Texas today and that means we are jeopardizing our state’s future. United Methodist Women are committed to doing the grassroots outreach to help Texans understand exactly what the choices are for school funding and what’s at stake if we don’t educate the next generation.”

The women also called on lawmakers to restore the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to its status before the 78th Legislature cut the program as part of a massive package of social service cuts. The women challenged lawmakers to expand CHIP to cover one million Texas children by January 2007.

“Texas has the highest child uninsured rate of any state, and it’s got to improve,” said Dr. Aurora Cepeda of Killeen. “There are about one million Texas children who meet CHIP’s guidelines, and the United Methodist Women want to see the state make an aggressive effort to get every single one of those kids insured.”

The women voted to support criminal justice reforms focusing on early intervention, recidivism prevention and strengthening inmate families. “We don’t want more prisons,” said Barbara Ford Young of San Antonio. “We object to the heartless and fatalistic assumptions policymakers rely on to project future prison populations. Our criminal justice experts should be finding ways to restore relationships and communities, not calculating which individuals and families the state is going to toss in the garbage.”

The women also voted to support proposals that would increase the availability of renewable energy in Texas. “Environmental stewardship is a core moral value for United Methodists that is laid out in our church’s official doctrine,” said Jane Sheer of Cooper.

Marcy Garza of Pharr said the most important part of the United Methodist Women’s legislative agenda would be communicating it to the state’s 100,000 UMW members and mobilizing them to advocate for their priorities. “Many of the people in our churches feel that their voice doesn’t matter, that lawmakers won’t listen to them,” Garza said. “As UMW leaders, our mission is to explain the issues to them, show them how to get involved, and prove to them that citizen advocacy does make a difference.”

The United Methodist Church is the second-largest Protestant denomination in the United States, with more than 8 million lay members nationally and more than 800,000 lay members in Texas. The United Methodist Women is a group within the United Methodist Church committed to social action and advocacy. There are an estimated 100,000 members of United Methodist Women in Texas.

For more information about the event, visit http://www.texasimpact.com or email bee@texasimpact.com