NOTE: Below, we re-post a column first posted by Georgia WIN List in early February 2009 following an inspiring speech Rev. Joanna M. Adams delivered during a Georgia WIN List Legislative breakfast. For perspective, President Barak Obama had recently delivered his first inaugural address and Sonny Perdue was in the middle of his second term as Georgia’s governor
During her speech, Rev. Adams outlined why she strongly supported the Georgia WIN List mission to elect more women to legislative seats and statewide office. There could be no better way to reflect upon her legacy than to re-read this column which she approved at the time. The column quotes extensively from the remarks Rev. Adams delivered and briefly from introductory remarks delivered by her dear friend and former parishioner Kathy Ashe, who at the time served as a state representative for the Ansley Park neighborhood.
It is striking to realize how prescient a 15-year-old speech can be! While statistics and budget figures quoted have obviously changed, the sentiments expressed are timeless and remain urgently relevant.
The Rev. Joanna Adams returned to Central Presbyterian Church, where she began her ministry more than three decades ago, on Tuesday Feb 3 to speak to a group of 100 legislators, candidates for upcoming elections and a host of donors to Georgia’s WIN List.
The speech marked the Political Action Committee’s annual legislative breakfast, where amongst those attending were the five women Senators and 18 women House members who were endorsed by WIN List in the most recent election cycle. Rev. Adams called the group “indispensable” and encouraged donors to be generous as the group begins recruiting candidates for the next election cycle.
Rev. Adams grew up in Mississippi at the height of the Civil Rights movement. In her introduction of Rev. Adams, Rep. Kathy Ashe, a long-time Central Presbyterian parishioner, described how Rev. Adams, as a child and long before she ever knew a woman could be a preacher, lined up her dolls and played church. “They were, quite honestly, the most attentive audience I have ever had,” Adams later recalled with a laugh.
Rep. Ashe recalled the reception to honor Rev. Adams on the day of her ordination at Central Presbyterian, in the same room where the legislative breakfast was held, had two uninvited guests – a homeless man and woman who came in from the cold. They were the first homeless people the young and newly ordained Rev. Adams had ever met.
But the encounter for her began a mission which transformed the church under the shadow of the Gold Dome and the way all of Atlanta, and particularly many of its religious institutions, look at the homeless and those who as Rev. Adams describes in a Biblical sense, “the least of these.”
Rev. Adams noted in her 30 years of dealing with Atlanta’s homeless population, alarmingly, the percentage of women and children who are homeless has grown. She cautioned that in a time of growing foreclosure rates, it is not just women and children who lose a single-family home and become homeless, but also those who live in apartment complexes which find themselves in foreclosure and end up sending their tenants to the street.
If her remarks had a recurring theme, it would be moral leadership – a leadership based on moral values, vision and moving forward with “hope in our hearts.” She called upon the audience to approach life in a proleptic fashion – assuming the future as if it already exists and “believe deep in your heart” of the better life to come.
She said President Barak Obama set a high moral ground for the nation when he said, “Our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle use to do as we please.” She also referred to John Kennedy’s September 1961 address when he said, “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” She added, “Let us all pray for ways to end war and be wary of the nuclear weapons which may raise their ugly heads again.”
She reminded those present of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s remarks as First Lady when addressing the 1995 UN Conference on Women in Beijing, “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights for one and for all. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely – and the right to be heard. Women must enjoy the rights to participate fully in the social and political lives of their countries if we want freedom and democracy to endure…When families flourish, communities and nations do as well.”
The United States ranks 69th in the world in the percentage of women serving in governing bodies, she noted. “That’s a lousy place to be on the chart. We need more women in political leadership.”
“Women look to the future, not just for their own children, but also for grandchildren and great-grandchildren,” she said. ”I love the great law of the Iroquois Nation which states, “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”
“The great New York Preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick retired to a suburb of New York, Bronxville, a very elegant place to live. He rode the train back into the city on a regular basis, because he kept an office in Manhattan. He noticed that on most mornings, a fellow commuter would pull the window shade down as the train passed over 128th Street,” she began. “The man would pull the shade down and close his eyes. One day, Dr. Fosdick asked him, “I’ve seen you pull that shade down every morning, and I’m curious as to why.”
The man replied, “I was born in that slum and I find it painful to remember, and besides there’s nothing I can do about it anyway.”
After a sympathetic silence, the old pastor responded, “I don’t mean to poke around in your private life, but surely at least you could keep the shade up.”
Rev. Adams continued, noting that two thirds of the world’s poorest people are women and two thirds of the world’s uneducated children are girls. “What are we going to do about that? We can’t just close our eyes or pull down the shade.”
Noting that Gov. Sonny Perdue has cut education funding by $2.1 billion during his tenure and proposes eliminating the school nurse program, Adams said, “The least we can do is think of the five- and eight-year-old children on asthma inhalers with no school nurse. By God, I want them to have a school nurse when they have a runny nose or a scraped knee on the playground. We’ve got to pay attention to our children.”
Rev Adams outlined other proposed cuts in the Governor’s budget: a one third cut in family planning services, an 11 percent cut in Adult Literacy funding, a reduction in the childcare subsidies budget, bringing it to a seven year low and reductions of staff for those who connect vulnerable populations to safety net services just as hard economic times make the need for those employees more critical and the elimination of new funding for family violence centers and sexual assault shelters. The War Veterans Home in Milledgeville was shuttered last year.
There is a 6,700-person waiting list for home and community-based programs for those with developmental disabilities – a list which grows by 1,000 each year. There is proposed legislation to lift the current insurance mandates for contraception, mammograms, pap smears, after childbirth hospital stays, immunizations and other preventive health care. Other proposed legislation would criminalize all abortions and make performing abortions a felony as well as restrict access to assisted reproductive technology.
“It is a mess, a mess about which something must be done,” Rev Adams said. “We need to call for the best in people. It is not a partisan test; it is a human test. We must take care of the widows and orphans and all the children.”
“We must work toward a world marked by justice, freedom, kindness and respect! When passionate women and men do the right thing, justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
“Georgia’s Win List is indispensable and now is the time to be more generous and supportive than ever before,” she said. “We must elect more women in the next election cycle.
“As philosophy professor Robert Roberts has written, “Because God can be angry, we know that anger can be right and fitting. But we must always remember that God’s anger is never an end in itself, but a means to transformation.” God is in the business of transformation, she continued, the business we as women need to be in. Righteous indignation can be expressed in a sweet, non-demanding way and without demonizing the enemy. There is a theological reason to be sweet, she said, and Southern women know it well.
“At the national Prayer service in Washington the day after the inauguration of Barak Obama, the preacher at the National Cathedral, the Reverend Sharon Watkins, told a story I have often told myself of the Cherokee grandfather who wanted to teach his grandson the most important thing he knew. He said that there lives inside of us two wolves,” Rev Adams said.
“One wolf is faith, truth, compassion and love. The other wolf is fear, anger, vengefulness and resentment.
“Which wolf wins,” the young boy asked.
“The one you feed,” the grandfather answered.
“Mr. President,” the preacher said, “Feed your good wolf please.”
Rev. Adams said we all must work for a world marked by “justice, freedom, kindness, and respect.”
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