Protesters Attend Cobb Prayer Breakfast

About 850 people representing Cobb County businesses, churches and government agencies attended the 27th Annual Cobb County Prayer Breakfast on Thursday morning.

The breakfast was held at the Cobb Galleria Centre and featured Bible and devotional readings and praise and worship performances.

The Cobb County Prayer Breakfast is held annually to celebrate the National Day of Prayer, an observation enacted by President Harry Truman in 1952. The prayer breakfast in Cobb County got its start in 1985 when a group of business and community leaders held the first breakfast to observe the National Day of Prayer. In 1988, Cobb County Board of Commissioners passed a resolution endorsing the breakfast.

This year’s breakfast included musical performances by Stanley Allyn Owen and a bagpipe performance of “Amazing Grace” by Winter Taylor. Shan Cooper, vice president of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics was the keynote speaker.

“I’m grateful, because I know that but for God’s grace I wouldn’t stand here before you today,” Cooper said. “Who would have predicted that a little girl, a little country girl, from Anniston, Ala. would be educated by some of the finest institutions, work for the actual best company in the world, have had the opportunity to travel the world and reside in a community like Cobb County where people are not afraid to publicly and boldly honor God.”

Some Cobb County residents wish the Cobb County breakfast attendees weren’t honoring God so publicly and boldly.

Five representatives from the Atlanta Freethought Society, a Smyrna-based group that promotes life without religion, protested the Cobb County Prayer Breakfast.

“We’re here today because government officials—I know former Gov. Roy Barnes is in there, I saw him this morning, I saw Commissioner Woody Thompson go in there—government officials are standing up and praying that they may be seen as men,” said Ed Buckner, chair of the activism task force at AFS. “They’re hypocrites. They’re not here because they want to worship God. They could go to any church they want to. They could pray in the closet as the Bible says they should, but they’re here making a big show of it.”

To the Atlanta Freethought Society members, the presence of politicians and government officials at the prayer breakfast violates separation of church and state.

“They’re not violating it by having an event,” Buckner said. “They’re violating it by having it out of a county office.”

Virgil Moon, director of the Cobb County Support Services Agency and president of the Cobb County Prayer Breakfast Committee Inc., runs a voicemail-only landline that provides information about the breakfast out of his office. The Marietta Daily Journal reported that while Moon’s staff does answer questions regarding the breakfast, they do so outside regular office hours and are paid by the prayer breakfast committee.

“Virgil Moon seems to think that, well the Cobb prayer breakfast foundation is paying these employees so that makes it OK,” Buckner said. “What he doesn’t understand is it’s not a technical matter of whether they’re using some private funds to pay everybody. They’re giving the appearance that this is a government sponsored event, that the government is making decisions about religion.”

While no members of government or political agencies participated in the prayer breakfast program, several had tables at the breakfast, including the Cobb County Republican Party, Cobb County Schools, Judge Tain Kell from Cobb County Superior Court, Cobb County Manager David Hankerson, the Cobb County Board of Commissioners and the Marietta Police Department.