Assembly speaker makes appeal for U.S. children By John H. Adams The Layman Online Thursday, June 20, 2002 214th General Assembly Columbus, Ohio June 15-22, 2002 COLUMBUS, Ohio – The mother in Dade County, Fla., was torn between choices. Should she stay at home and not be able to take care of her two children financially or should she work and lock the children in the apartment while she was gone? She chose the latter. The two children climbed into a clothes dryer and burned to death. With that story, Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund, called on the 214th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) to continue supporting children's causes in America. She quoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer as saying that the test of a nation's morality is what it is doing for its children. "America is flunking that test very badly," she said during a presentation to the assembly's opening plenary session June 19. "The state of children is morally shameful, economically costly and politically hypocritical." Edelman spoke of children born into poverty, living in families without health insurance and being gunned down on the streets. "We have lost over 87,000 children to gunfire since 1979," she said. "That is more than we lost in casualties in Vietnam. Where is our anti-gun movement for children?" Edelman said there incongruencies in America. "We have won 168 prizes in science. Don't tell me we cannot teach children to read. We have the money, we have the power, we have the know-how, we have experience. What we lack is the civic and civil will of enough people of faith." She urged Presbyterians to help "prevent a child from suffering the poisonous politics of self-interest, the political hypocrisy at all levels of government." Edelman gave President George W. Bush a compliment and an admonition. "I think we should be flattered when the president has borrowed our mission – 'Leave no child behind' – but he cannot have it unless he does it." She also criticized "the refusal of our rich nation to protect and invest in a safe, affordable child-care system. I hope you will make your voice heard until our children's needs are attended to. To those who say we can't afford it, I say nonsense." She concluded, "Justice is the right of every human child, and the mandate of this church is justice."

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