I found Wednesday’s column by Star Parker (“GOP health bill foes akin to abolitionists”) typical of the fuzzy thinking of most conservatives. To compare Freedom Caucus members to abolitionists of the slavery era is a stretch that boggles the mind.

Abolitionists, typified by editor William Lloyd Garrison, author Harriet Beecher Stowe and Sen. Charles Sumner, were opposing the most ethically corrupt practice that has ever occurred in America. Slavery was reprehensible and those founding fathers that supported it in any manner, either by deed or by compromise, should be held in very low esteem.

The 29 members of the Republican party Freedom Caucus, whose refusal to support the Trump-Ryan “health care” bill which killed it, did not vote no because the bill was reprehensible. They voted no because they believed that ANY government health care should be abolished; that the Trump-Ryan bill, even though it dropped 20 million off the health insurance roll, was just too much socialism.

The Freedom Caucus members are ignorant of the fact that universal health care is quite common in all the developed countries; that it is a right, along with life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of the press. To place the Freedom Caucus members on the same lofty pedestal as the abolitionists of the slavery era is typical of Ms. Star’s political mindset — defective and misguided.

Howard Stacy
Gainesville