From Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears’ speech yesterday to the NRA Women’s Leadership Forum, alluding to the slaughter of innocents at Uvalde, Texas:
America is in a battle for her children. We weep for the breakdown of the family. We weep for fatherless homes. We weep for the lack of respect for fellow men. We weep over the countless Black men murdering each other. We weep at the onslaught against the liberty of thought and expression.
Indeed we have left goodness, gentleness, and kindness behind, only to be left loathing, crudeness, greed, and sloth. Every man for himself, we are easily offended. cruelty abounds. Forgiveness is a dirty word.
Yes, guns are part of the problem, and I’m open to the idea that tighter control over guns may be part of the solution. But the problem is so much bigger. Our society is disintegrating before our eyes, but many are blind to it — indeed, many are cheering it on. Sears speaks to the broader malaise. I cannot find a link to the full text of her speech online, so I replicate it below:
Update: The speech text has been posted here.
NRA Women’s Leadership Forum
May 27, 2022
Good morning.
Thank you for coming and exercising your rights to assemble and to speak freely. These are our God-given rights to be free in our great country. They are our first amendment rights.
We are here also to support our second amendment rights.
They did not want me to come, thinking you are monsters, that you are culpable in the murder of the children.
As you all know, the NRA was first established by Union veterans.
I look at you, and I see mothers, daughters, sisters, and grandmothers, YOU are the NRA. People. You are not this nebulous entity. How far we have fallen that we have labeled you monsters, our fellow law-abiding Americans?
This week, we Americans are once again grieving.
It is a time to weep.
Jer 31:15 tells us,
“ In Ramah, she hears the sound of sobbing, bitter weeping. Rachel mourns for her children but she refuses to be comforted because her children are no more.”
This time, we weep for the children of Robb Elementary School of Uvalde in this great state of Texas.
This should not have happened. Again.
America is in a battle for her children. We weep for the breakdown of the family. We weep for fatherless homes. We weep for the lack of respect for fellow men. We weep over the countless Black men murdering each other. We weep at the onslaught against the liberty of thought and expression.
Indeed we have left goodness, gentleness, and kindness behind, only to be left loathing, crudeness, greed, and sloth. Every man for himself, we are easily offended. cruelty abounds. Forgiveness is a dirty word.
Trust shouts that we are losing our way. She is our canary in the coal mine, telling us that America is running headlong into a dangerous abyss. Demonstrators run into churches and disrupt services.
People destroy each other on unsocial media, or destroy themselves with drug overdoses.
Our leaders tell their followers to “show up wherever we have to show up..in a restaurant, in a department store, ….push back on them…tell them they are not welcome anymore”.
We have proposed laws that say that a baby can be aborted up to the day of birth, yet we conduct surgery in the womb. Our language has degenerated such that F-bombs and even the startling MF bombs are spoken across our airways without so much as a gasp or even a clutch of the pearls, real or fake.
Virtue has signaled to us that we are to cease using her to destroy rather than build up. Especially when the self-appointed community deciders are no better than those whom they deem inferior.
Nina Simone sums our present-day woes in her song Baltimore, “Hard times in the city in the hard town by the sea. Ain’t nowhere to run to. There ain’t nothing here for free. Hooker on the corner, waiting for a train, drunk lying on the sidewalk, sleeping in the rain. The people hide their faces, and they hide their eyes, because the city is dying, and they don’t know why.”
Why?
Because we took prayer out of schools. We have so liberated our sexuality, that we are now informed that men can have abortions. This they say with straight faces, with certainty and arrogance, masquerading as indignation.
In seeking to right past wrongs, we wrong those who played no part.
We are so successful in our discombobulation that we free criminals in the name of justice to further antagonize us, even to the point of our death. We watch as criminals destroy our businesses and smash and grab and call it social justice.
Even though little Johnny cannot read nor write, we socially promote him in the name of preserving his self-esteem in the short term, only to destroy him in the long term. And the media are complicit. Indeed they are our modern-day sirens.
So what is to become of America?
Prov. 13:22 tells us that a good man provides an inheritance for his children’s children. We are told that guns are the problem but if we fail to identify the real problem, we come away with the wrong solutions. Because a determined mentally unstable person will try to find other means to their wicked deed – whether with a car, Molotov cocktail, or some other means.
Our society is hurting, yes. Our mental health is deteriorating because our families are disintegrating before our eyes. Suicides and overdoses are now epidemics in our country. Covid protocols and lockdowns didn’t help. During my prison ministry and homeless women’s shelter duties, one thing was clear – men were absent in raising young men. We have emasculated our men.
Here is where I am:
1. I support the 2nd amendment of our Constitution and your right to defend yourself. In fact, the fastest-growing demographic of gun owners is Black women. The first demographic to have their guns confiscated and denied 2nd amendment rights were Blacks. Regardless of political affiliation, gender, race, geography, age, or experience, the number one reason given for purchasing a firearm is personal protection.
2. Our mental health system is in desperate need of reform and appropriate funding. This MUST be a primary focus for leaders in our nation and our communities. We need a meaningful national dialogue for the specific purpose of significant positive change.
3. We need to ensure that every school has the resource officers and security measures to protect our children, teachers, and administrators
4. Defunding and defaming the police is not an answer. Clearly. There are bad apples in every profession – bad doctors, teachers, plumbers, police – and we will get rid of the bad apples as we remain safe.
5. Churches and communities need to step up. More government action cannot be the only answer. No, it goes deeper than that.
6. We need to invigorate the concepts of personal responsibility and accountability.
7. We must provide hope for our incarcerated by giving them a good education so that they will leave prison with the skills necessary to become productive citizens, the mommies and daddies their children need.
In light of the horrors against the children and teachers of Uvalde, Governor Youngkin and I will declare Tuesday, May 31, as a statewide day of Prayer for Peace in the Commonwealth of Virginia. We must move forward in love and unity.
America is known for second chances. Indeed, you gave my father a second chance at life when he arrived from Jamaica with only $1.75 in his pocket. And you gave me a second chance when I arrived at 6 years old, an immigrant.
Was it perfect then? No.
Is it perfect now? No.
What America gave me then and still gives me now is, in fact, perfect.
And that my fellow Americans are – HOPE.
I took Psalm 133 as my campaign motto: How good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters live together in harmony.
President Lincoln talked to us about harmony in his Gettysburg Address when he said, Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived, can long endure.
We will endure. For the sake of our children’s children. Our children will not just survive, they will thrive. Because we will leave it better than we found it. Our children are depending on us. There is no other refuge like America.
Our people fight and die to preserve her. In a few days, we will celebrate Memorial Day, so that the men and women who died for liberty will not be forgotten. They did not die in vain.
We must preserve America – there is no utopia. Every country has its faults. If it’s not racism, it’s classism. Or color-ism. Or some kind of ism.
Sure, America has her faults. After every election cycle, some people say that if their side loses, they will leave America. But They Never DO.
We have a saying in church, I may not be what I’m supposed to be, but I ain’t what I used to be. And that’s America. Because, here I am, an immigrant, woman, Black, and yet, I am the Lieutenant Governor of the great Commonwealth of Virginia. I am 2nd in command of the former capital of the Confederacy. God has brought us a mighty long way. In fits and starts, she is getting there – America is getting there. As the Lord said, Rachel will weep no longer. There is hope for our future.
May God comfort those who mourn.
May God bless the United States of America.
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