Issues of the Day

Floor Speech

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Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friends, Congressman Blum and the future Senator DeSantis, for great words and great insights.

Mr. Speaker, I first want to answer a couple of questions that people have had about a couple of votes that my friends, Justin Amash and Thomas Massie, and I had.

One is on H.R. 4742. It is described to authorize the National Science Foundation to support entrepreneurial programs for women.

Since my wife and I have been blessed with three beautiful daughters, inside and out, all three of them absolutely brilliant--these type of things are important to me--but I note that it says, ``studies have shown that technology and commercialization ventures are successful when women are in top management positions.''

It also puts into law that the requirement that, under the Science and Engineering Equal Opportunities Act, it is required that the National Science Foundation encourage its entrepreneurial programs to recruit and support women to extend their focus beyond the laboratory and into the commercial world.

Now, it just seems like--and I know these are incredibly well intended. Both H.R. 4742 and H.R. 4745 are very, very well intended. Wonderful people put them forward. I understand that.

But just from my experience and from the common sense I hear as I get all over east Texas, it just seems like Washington is always a step behind or--an old saying--a day late and a dollar short.

Now we are $19 trillion short. But we want to take time from our $19 trillion in debt to demand that the National Science Foundation discriminate based on gender.

There may be some young boy who needs encouragement from a tough family situation, but this program is designed to discriminate against that young, poverty-stricken boy and to encourage the girl. Forget the boy. Encourage the girl.

It just seems that, if we are ever going to get to the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., that he spoke just down the Mall, he wanted people to be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.

I know after race has been an issue that needed attention, then gender appropriately got attention, because the whole Constitution of the United States, when it is properly read verbatim, means men, women, race, creed, color, national origin, and gender.

Those things are not supposed to matter. It just seems like, when we come in and we say that it is important that for a while we discriminate, we end up getting behind.

And then probably 25 years from now boys are going to have fallen behind in numbers, and then we are going to need to come in and say: Actually, when we passed that bill forcing encouragement of girls and not encouraging of little boys, we were getting behind the eight ball. We didn't see that we were going to be leaving little boys in the ditch, and now we need to start doing programs to encourage little boys.

We are always going to be behind until we get around to saying from this House floor that we don't care where you are from, we don't care what your gender is, and we don't care what you like look. You may be as homely as Abraham Lincoln. We don't care what you look like.

We don't care about the color of your hair or the lack of hair. We don't care. We want you not to have an equal outcome, but to have an equal opportunity to excel, and then let the best person do the best job and excel. That is what has made free market systems work so well.

I was reminded to check out a lady that is known as Madame Curie, Marie Sklowdowska Curie, Madame Curie. It says she was born in Warsaw, then the Kingdom of Poland.

Her achievements included the development of the theory of radioactive isotopes and the discovery of two elements: polonium and radium. Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms, using radioactive isotopes; she founded the Curie Institutes in Paris and in Warsaw; and she won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in radiation.

So as I think about it, it has got to be millions and millions of lives that this brilliant woman, Madame Curie, has saved because of her work. She died early at 66 because of her work in the laboratory--she had aplastic anemia, apparently from her work with radioactive isotopes--but the lives that woman saved by her work in the laboratory.

However, if our bill, H.R. 4742, had been in law back in Poland or France as she tried to move forward, the Science Foundation there would have been required to tell Madame Curie: Do you know what? You are pretty good in the laboratory, but under this law from the wisdom of Congress, we are supposed to tell you to go into commercial enterprise and make a whole bunch more money because you are better off not being in the laboratory but being out in the commercial world because you will be a better businessperson than men. You need to get out there.

I thank God that there wasn't a program like this that distracted her. This brilliant, caring woman basically gave her life to save many, many millions by the phenomenal work she did in the laboratory.

But according to the bill that we passed today, we are requiring the Science Foundation to encourage entrepreneurial programs to recruit and support women to extend their focus beyond the laboratory and into the commercial world. Thank God that is not what Madame Curie did.

We did have another bill. Part of the program is good for boys and girls, but then there is a part, Aspire to Inspire, that engages young girls to present science, technology, engineering, and mathematics career opportunities, et cetera.

And on the next one, provide an opportunity for female middle school students. We don't want to provide an opportunity under this bill for boys. Let the boys fight, let them get into gangs; but the women, the young girls, that is who we want to encourage.

In section 3, NASA shall--not just may, but shall--encourage women and girls to study science, technology, and engineering.

I was inspired in a little town in Mount Pleasant, Texas, growing up by people who encouraged boys and girls equally. We had some very, very smart girls and we had some smart guys. Our teachers really didn't care whether we were boys or girls. They wanted us to work hard and they wanted us to excel. They were incredibly good teachers, and I learned so much. I learned so much in math that in college algebra at Texas A&M, I didn't have to open my book but for 15 minutes for the final. That is all I had to do for the whole semester because of the incredible bases I got in math from my seventh grade teacher, Ms. Edwards, and my high school math teachers were terrific.

But, anyway, I hope that we can get beyond pandering and try to get to the point where we, as a Congress, will say: We don't care what you look like. The things you can't help, how you look, your gender, we don't care about those. We want you to have an equal opportunity with everybody else.

I hope and pray that is the direction we go.

I also hope and pray that those who are suffering in Europe, in Brussels, after the horrendous attacks by radical Islamists, will be comforted by friends and by God himself. For those who have lost loved ones, we need to reach out to the families and be for them, with them, and encourage them. But the best legacy we could provide would be to stop the insane efforts to win over radical Islamists by trying to be this phenomenal friend to them.

An article today by Greg Botelho from CNN says, and these are the highlights: ``A U.S. official speculates ISIS is `trying to make an international statement' by attacking the home of NATO, the EU.''

He also points out: ``Two explosions rock the Brussels airport, another rips through a subway station in the Belgian capital.''

This article from CNN, unfortunately, says: ``While jarring, the carnage wasn't altogether surprising. Belgium has been going after terrorist threats for months, as illustrated by last week's capture of Europe's most wanted man, Salah Abdeslam, in a bloody raid in Brussels.''

Apparently if you stand up against radical Islam to stop these people who would take us back to the Dark Ages of despotism, book burning, and horrors of basic slavery if you don't believe as you are told, we will be better off if we can be nice to them.

We have an administration that said Iran is the biggest supporter of terrorism in the world, so we think maybe if we cut a deal where we release to them $100 billion to $150 billion, that they will surely start being nice to us.

And those Castros, Fidel and Raul Castro, down in Cuba, they have been dictators. They have tortured, they have been horrendous in the harm that they have brought to the people of Cuba.

How do we know, even though people like Sean Penn and others have told us how wonderful it is, they have the best health care in the world?

Well, it turns out, actually, they are really wanting to get to the United States. It turns out they are wanting to come in droves to the United States because it is not so good living under a dictator like the Castros.

What the President has done, unknowingly, is put his stamp of approval on a dictatorship that has been incredibly brutal, just as this administration did to the terrorists in charge in Iran. People will further suffer, just as they have in the last few days while the President visited Cuba.

The administration in charge in Cuba, the dictators, were brutalizing people who had the gall to come out and want to act as if they had freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. One poor woman was beaten, stripped naked, and dragged off to jail. Apparently that is okay under the new approach of the U.S. administration if we are trying to outreach to them and they are wanting our outreach to go better.

The fact is it is one thing to have relations commercially with another country, but when we, as the United States, the freest country that has ever existed until we began to lose our freedoms here more recently, when we yield to dictators, to terrorist leaders like in Iran, the world suffers. We have been given a massive responsibility by being the freest and, up until recently, possibly the most powerful country in the world.

China has come on strong. Others have nuclear weapons that will use them and want to use them. Our position is in jeopardy. To whom much is given of them, much will be required. We should be more faithful so that when a country like Nigeria begs help to deal with radical Islam and Boko Haram, we should not have to hear from a Catholic bishop in Nigeria that the Obama administration is demanding that they change their laws to embrace same-sex marriage against their religious beliefs, appropriate for abortion even when it violates their religious beliefs, chide the leader of Kenya or other countries to give up their religious beliefs, and follow the amoral teaching of whoever happens to be in charge in America.

There are consequences for using the power of the United States to bully other countries and to allow them to suffer immeasurably while we act haute as if, because of their Christian beliefs, they are not as worthy as those in the United States that do not follow Christian beliefs.

More Christians are suffering and being persecuted, but Jesus said: You will suffer for my sake.

As we see also in Israel in the latest attack there, people are suffering and being killed. FOX News had this article regarding the Peninsula Group based in Tel Aviv. There is massive suffering at the hands of radical Islam.

As Europe suffers dreadfully at the hands of radical Islam and at the hands of people who have poured into their countries illegally due to their naive but permissive policies, the last thing they need to hear is from the United States President that they need to be careful, not to be biased or prejudiced against the radical Islamists that want to kill them and have killed their family members, because according to this administration, the far bigger danger is bias against those who want to kill us and eliminate our civilized way of life. God help us all.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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