Religious Freedom

Floor Speech

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Mr. WALBERG. I appreciate the opportunity from the gentleman from California to stand with my colleagues tonight to speak on an important issue.

It was an amazing experience for me this morning to be part of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and to have a hearing where we had numerous members of religious organizations, including leaders in the Catholic, the Jewish, and the Protestant faiths, in front of us, men who were appealing for rights that should be taken for granted in this country, the rights of religious freedom.

It brought back to me the thoughts that I experienced just a year ago almost this very day when I was in Israel and had the opportunity to hear from the Prime Minister of Israel as he spoke with glowing admiration for America. He talked about the religious liberty that was unlike any other place in the world in Israel today for all faiths, all religions, based upon, as he said, the experience, the value, and the documents of America and its foundings.

And so, today, to hear our religious leaders speaking for their religious liberty was unreal. Those documents that the Prime Minister of Israel referred to going back to the Declaration of Independence, where it says:

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Liberty.

And our First Amendment has been quoted numerous times tonight. The beginning of the Bill of Rights:

Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

These truly sacred documents, documents that we live by, at least we should, documents that we can carry and quote from, are under serious attack today. These documents of liberty, liberty, not just for organizations but for individuals, not just for churches, but for parishioners who have businesses, who are body shop owners, who are lawyers, who are doctors and have employees that they want to care for.

We have today a Justice of the Supreme Court who recommends to a country looking for a constitution to write, not America's Constitution, but constitutions of other countries. Unbelievable.

And attorneys, labor attorneys pooh-poohing the opposition to attacks on our own Constitution as constitutional niceties. This is not America that we understand.

And now the attack on the constitutional right of religious conscience, the foundational liberty upon which this great land was birthed, our churches and our individuals.

We would do well to listen, Mr. Speaker, to the warnings of our Framers and Founders.

And with this I close: Jonathan Witherspoon, a minister who signed the Declaration of Independence said:

A republic once equally poised must either preserve its virtue or lose its liberty.

John Adams followed by saying:

Liberty lost once is liberty lost forever.

We would do well also to take the heed of enemy voices who desire the destruction of America and its liberty, lest we unwittingly follow and fall into their advice, advice such as this that was said:

America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold; its patriotism, its morality, its spiritual life. If we undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.

Joseph Stalin.

May God grant us, Mr. Speaker, wisdom so that our President, this Congress, and all of America will never let these words be a prophecy fulfilled.

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