[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 84 (Tuesday, June 10, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H5167-H5171]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
AMERICA'S GREATEST THREAT
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Feeney). Under the Speaker's announced
policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne) is
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I think that our recent military successes
in Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated very clearly that we are the
preeminent military force in the world. Our economy, although it has
been somewhat slowed recently, is certainly the strongest in the world.
By most measures, the United States is the most powerful Nation in
the world. At the present time, we stand alone in a position of
preeminence; and so sometimes when one is in that position, it is easy
to begin to think that we are invincible and that this will go on
forever, and certainly we hope that that is the case.
Then I think it is important that we cast a historical frame of
reference on all of the recent circumstances on things that have
happened.
Certainly 2,500 years ago, the Greeks were preeminent; and they, I am
sure, felt that their culture would last forever and that they would be
in a preeminent position until history ended; and then 500 years later,
2000 years ago, we found that the Roman empire had superseded Greece,
and again, for a period of time, it was the most powerful nation in the
world, just dominated the then-civilized world as we knew it.
150 years ago, the British Empire certainly was the most dominant
nation in the world and controlled most of the affairs in the
discovered world at that time; and of course, even the Soviet Union
just 20 years ago appeared to be an almost invincible force. It was our
rival. And so the United States and Soviet Union were the two most
powerful nations in the world; and yet in each case, each one of these
great civilizations, each one of these nations fell, and the
interesting thing was that they did not fall from outside forces. It
was not because somebody took them over. Rather, they fell from
internal factors; and so their unity of purpose, their national
resolve, the character of their people began to crumble, and as a
result, they all to some degree became less powerful, and to some
degree they became history.
So what is America's greatest threat today? I am sure some would say
al Qaeda. Some would say it is the ongoing conflict in the Middle East
between Israel and Palestine. Some would say it is the nuclear
capabilities of North Korea and possibly Iran. Others would say the
biggest problem we have is the economy, and certainly all of these
things are important, and certainly they are all worthy of our
attention, and they certainly get it in this body on a daily basis.
I would submit to my colleagues that from my perspective the greatest
threat that this Nation faces today is not outside forces, but rather,
it is unraveling of the culture from within. So I am going to tonight,
Mr. Speaker, document this thesis in some ways, and the reason I say
this is because I have had considerable experience working with young
people over 36 years.
From 1962 to 1997, I spent almost all of my time working with young
people.
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Most of them were ages 17 to 22, but I also spent a lot of time in high
schools with summer camps where I worked with kids in the 9th, 10th and
11th and 12th grade. I coached 150 young men every year, visited 70 to
80 high schools in all parts of the country. Some were in inner cities,
some were in suburbs, some were in rural areas; and I sat in 70 to 80
living rooms all around the country from wealthy to poor to rural. So I
am not saying, Mr. Speaker, that I understand the whole situation that
is going on in our country; but over those 36 years, I began to see
some things that were of concern, some things that I think are worthy
of note.
The young people I worked with were talented; and as time went on,
they became bigger and faster and stronger and in some cases smarter,
but they also were more troubled. I saw more personal problems. I saw
more stress. I saw more young people who were off balance; and as a
result, over that 36-year period, I progressively spent less and less
time coaching and more and more time dealing with personal issues; and
I think almost anyone in education would tell us the same thing,
whether they are a school administrator or a teacher or a coach. Anyone
who works consistently with young people over a period of time will
tell us that things have changed. There has been a shift, and as far as
stability, it has not been for the better.
I think, Mr. Speaker, there are several factors that have contributed
to these changes, and the first of these that is very obvious, and I
think almost anyone would recognize this, is a change in family
stability. In 1960, when I first started working with young people, the
out-of-wedlock birthrate was 5 percent. Today, it is 33 percent. So
roughly one out of every three children are born out of wedlock, with
no stable marriage and have two strikes against them. That is an
increase over that period of time of 600 percent.
In 1960, the great majority of young people lived with both
biological parents. We would occasionally see a young person who was
from a single-parent family, but usually if we did so, it was because
one parent or the other was deceased. Today, roughly one-half of our
young people are growing up without both biological parents, again, an
increase of probably 3 to 500 percent in terms of lack of stable
families.
Today, only 7 percent of our families are so-called traditional
families. So the family that we have is generally a father works, a
mother stays home with the children and is a full-time homemaker or at
least if the mother works, the father stays home, and yet only 7
percent of our families are of that nature today.
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So we often think of latchkey kids belonging in the inner city where
they come home after school and nobody is there, but I can tell Members
from personal experience that there are roughly 80-90 percent of the
young people in the suburbs and rural areas, nobody is home at 3
o'clock and they are latchkey kids as well.
So this has been a tremendous shift in our demographics. Parents
today spend 40 percent less time with their children than a generation
ago. The average parent spends no more than a few minutes with each
child, and a huge amount of time is eaten up with the television set
and work activities. The divorce rate has increased, from 1960 to 1995,
300 percent. Currently today, 24 million children are living without
their real father.
I dealt with a lot of those young people and I remember particularly
one case where this young man was a good football player, and by his
junior year he was being mentioned as being an All-American. One day I
got a phone call from a man living in another State and he wanted to
know if I knew this player. I said, I coach him. He said, ``That is my
son. I would like to talk to him.''
So I talked to this young man and I thought he would be thrilled
being reunited with his father. He said, ``He left me when I was 1 or 2
years old and now the only reason he wants to talk to me is because I
am somewhat famous as a player, and I do not want to talk to him.''
I sensed the anguish. I saw young people time and time again who had
a father who was missing in their life and they were trying to fill
that void, and usually it was with all the wrong stuff; and it was not
just young men, it was young women as well.
This Sunday is Father's Day, and fatherless children are in some
difficult circumstances at the present time. Fatherless children are
120 percent more likely to experience child abuse, twice as likely to
drop out of school, 2-3 times more likely to have mental or emotional
problems, 1\1/2\ times to 2 times more likely to abuse drugs and
alcohol, and 11 times more likely to commit a violent act.
I ran into a story recently that is true, and this had to do with a
greeting card business that contacted a prison. Mother's Day was
approaching and they notified all of the prisoners that they would
provide a Mother's Day card free if the prisoner would use it and send
it to his mother. They had almost 100 percent participation.
Practically all of the inmates took the card and mailed it to their
mother. They thought this was quite a success.
So Father's Day was rolling around and they thought they would do it
again. And the interesting thing, Mr. Speaker, in that particular
prison there was hardly anyone who asked for a card to send to his
father because, I would assume, because none knew their father, or
their father had abandoned them.
What I am saying as far as the family is that the launching pad, the
family, is not totally broken. We have some good families in our
country, but the launching pad is certainly cracked, and changes have
been undertaken in our society that are going to be really difficult
for us to rectify in the immediate future.
So on top of the family disintegrating to some degree, we find that
the environment in which young people are living has changed
dramatically. When I began coaching in the 1960s, drug abuse was almost
unheard of. We had never heard of cocaine, steroids, methamphetamine.
We heard a little bit about marijuana, but that was somebody out in
Hollywood, and none of the young people I was dealing with had
experienced it. Of course today, currently, we find that we have a drug
epidemic on our hands, and that includes alcohol. We have between 2 and
3 million teenage alcoholics in our country today. So the drug issue
has become one of epidemic proportion.
The thing that is really interesting to me and astounding to me and
discouraging to me is at one time we assumed rural America was the
bastion of the family, and that was the one place we could count on
traditional values. Yet we find at the present time that drug abuse in
rural areas is equal to that of the urban areas, if not greater. The
greatest scourge currently in rural areas that we have is
methamphetamine abuse. It is roughly twice as prevalent as it is in the
cities. If you are addicted to meth, the time that you are going to
have to spend in inpatient treatment to have any chance of being cured
is not 3 months as it is for alcohol and other drugs, it is roughly 24-
36 months, and then the odds are very good you will not beat it and
meth probably at some point will kill you.
The average meth addict will commit roughly 130 crimes per year to
support that habit. Imagine the cost to each community of one meth
addict, and we have rampant meth abuse in the rural areas. We also have
the highest rate of violence of any civilized nation in the world at
the present time. The United States has the highest homicide rate. We
have the highest suicide rate, and of course we have had numerous
school shootings in the United States in recent years, and Columbine is
almost the catch word for that type of activity. So the violence
activity has escalated astronomically over the last 25 years.
Also, pornography has exploded. There are over 1 million porn sites
on the Internet today. Sixty percent of all sites on the Internet have
to do with pornography, and that is more than one-half. Additionally,
there are more than 100,000 child porn sites on the Internet. Child
pornography is illegal, and yet we have 100,000 child porn sites. So
our children, our young people, are being engulfed by a wave of
pornography.
It has been estimated that 1 out of 10 children between the ages of 8
and 16
[[Page H5169]]
have viewed pornography on the Internet, and mostly this has been
unintentional. They have used a search word such as Pokemon, Disney,
Barbie, ESPN, and those search words bring up a porn site, and once you
bring up a porn site, you begin to get spam, which is dozens of porn
sites and the child is inundated with pornography.
I was really surprised about a year ago, Mr. Speaker, to realize that
my name used as a search word brought up a porn site. We were able to
get that rectified, but the average young person in my district who is
maybe doing a research paper on his or her Congressman and plugged in
my name would all of a sudden be confronted with a porn site. In a
civilized Nation that simply should not happen. I have grandchildren
ages 3-10. I have four of them. I can imagine that they will someday be
exposed to hard-core pornography, and this should not happen. Many
people say pornography is a victimless crime. It does not really hurt
anybody so what you see and hear does not make any difference in terms
of how you behave.
If that is true, why do we have an advertising industry that spends
billions of dollars on advertising? Obviously, if you see a soft drink
advertised in an appealing ad, it changes your behavior. You are more
apt to purchase that soft drink or automobile or whatever is being
advertised. Obviously what we see and what we hear has a tremendous
impact on our behavior, and our young people today are being inundated
with these kinds of messages, and that is discouraging to see.
The video game is also a problem. Today, 8- to 18-year-old boys
average 40 minutes a day playing video games. There is nothing wrong
with that as long as the video games are within the lines. They might
be a little bit violent, but they are probably not going to be a real
problem. But we see that some of these games have gotten progressively
more and more violent and more and more graphic. Many of them teach
stalking and killing techniques that are actually used in training
military personnel, Special Forces, to go out and kill people.
One particular video game that we saw recently here in Congress was
such an example. It was one in which the young person would engage in
stalking someone and shooting them, and if you hit them in the right
place in the head and the blood flew, you were rewarded by a series of
pornographic images. That was your reward. So people say that is for
adults and those were adult-rated games, but the average person who
plays those games is 12 years old. The marketing is beamed directly at
young people who are teenage and preteenage children.
There is no way, Mr. Speaker, that you can play these kinds of games
for any length of time and not have it impact you in some way in the
depths of your psyche.
There was a school shooting in Kentucky a couple of years ago, and
the young man who did the shooting went 9 for 9. He shot at 9 young
people and he hit all 9. Many law enforcement people said that was
amazing. Hardly any law enforcement individual could have done that,
but the amazing thing was this particular shooter had not fired a gun
before. He had played a lot of video games, and in playing those video
games, he had shot lots of people. Apparently he got very good at it
because he was almost perfect in his score. That shows you what video
games can do.
We have much music, some television, many movies, some talk shows are
very explicit and very graphic, and all of these things, if you think
about it, simply could not have been put on the airwaves 30 years ago.
It would have been impossible to present this kind of material, and yet
we have drifted so far that this becomes commonplace and nobody
objects. And obviously, this is impacting the minds and hearts of our
young people.
The family is less stable. The environment young people are growing
up in is more threatening, and also I would submit that our value
system has shifted and shifted considerably. I would point to a study
that was done by Stephen Covey who wrote the ``7 Habits of Highly
Successful People'' and what he did was research everything that he
could find that had to do with success. He said that he noticed a
marked shift. He said in the first 150 years in our country's history,
success was defined primarily in terms of character traits. A
successful person was honest, a successful person was hardworking, a
successful person was faithful, was loyal, compassionate. And so really
it had to do with qualities of virtue, and that is what success was.
Then he said about 50-60 years ago he began to notice a shift in the
literature that he was reading. He noticed that at the present time and
for the last 50 years or so that success is now defined in terms of
material possessions, in terms of power, and in terms of prestige. So a
successful person has money. He may not be an admirable person, but if
he has enough money, he is successful. He may have influence and power,
and if that is the case, he may not be a good person or an admirable
person, but he is a successful person. He may be very popular. He may
have people wanting his or her autograph, and he may not be a very good
role model, but if he has popularity, he is labeled successful.
So success is no longer linked to character and that is an
interesting shift in the way that our value system has come about.
In 1998, there was a poll done that indicated a very high approval
rating for the President who was in office at that time. Even though
that particular President had misbehaved rather badly with an intern in
the Oval Office and had lied to the American public, he still enjoyed a
very high approval rating.
{time} 2115
The thing that really grabbed my attention was that there was a poll
that was done and the question that was posed to the American public
was this: Is there any correlation between job performance and private
behavior? In other words, what you do in your private life, does that
have anything to do with your job performance? Seventy percent of
American adults say it has no connection, that there is no relation.
You can be a bank president and do all kinds of unscrupulous things in
your private life, and it does not affect your job. You can be a very
unscrupulous coach, and it would not make any difference in how you did
your job. It was amazing to me that this many people in the American
public would say that there is no correlation between job performance
and private behavior, because what we are saying here is that character
really does not count, because what you do in private essentially is an
issue of character. The value system has certainly changed in that
regard.
In the business world, we have seen some changes. I would submit that
WorldCom and Enron and Global Crossing were not isolated instances.
These were not accidental happenings. It was simply a reflection of the
shift that we have had in this culture to an all-out infatuation with
material success. And so anything goes in those types of situations.
The Great Wall of China, Mr. Speaker, was breached twice. It was
several thousand miles long. It was believed to be impenetrable. As a
result, it was built to keep out the barbarian hordes. Yet twice it was
breached. In neither case was it a situation where the barbarians
overran the wall, knocked it down or had a military victory. It was
because they bribed the gatekeeper. What I would submit at the present
time is that a lot of our gatekeepers at the present time have not been
responsible. As a result, we see a lack of trust in our country today
that is almost unprecedented. Many people no longer believe that some
of the leaders that we have in various industries and politics and
athletics and the business world can be trusted. Of course, the
alarming thing here is that democracy is based on trust. When trust
evaporates, then it is very difficult to run an effective democracy.
The predominant world view today, Mr. Speaker, is something called
postmodernism. Postmodernism is a belief that there are no moral
absolutes, that nothing is absolutely good or bad in and of itself. As
a famous individual recently said, the Ten Commandments are irrelevant.
And so everything is relative. Theft is justified at times. If you need
what you are stealing bad enough, it can be justified. Everything is
relative. Murder certainly could be justified if you happen to kill
someone who is really not an admirable person. You can rationalize that
it is okay. Adultery is certainly something that is acceptable if
nobody
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is going to find out. Even treason would be okay if you were angry
enough or hated your country badly enough. Postmodernism has dominated
our thought and I think has had a tremendous amount to do with the way
our young people and our country begin to see things.
In view of the fact that we have had a family breakdown, we have had
a decline of the culture and a shifting of values, this is an extremely
difficult time for our young people. They are being asked to weave
their way through a minefield. In this minefield, there is alcohol and
drug abuse over here, there is harmful video games over here,
unwholesome music and television over here, there is promiscuity over
here and gangs here, violent behavior and broken homes and all of those
things; and somehow we are saying, you have got to get through this
thing and you are probably going to have to do it by yourself because
you are not going to get much parental support or adult support. And so
we are asking our young people to do something that is very, very
difficult and in some cases almost impossible. What we find is that our
children's feet are not set on a rock but they are, rather, set on
sand.
I think it is important we pay attention to these issues because a
culture is never more than one generation away from dissolution. There
is no permanence if the next generation coming up cannot pull it off.
And so we need to think about this. De Tocqueville said something that
was very interesting. It was a powerful sentence. He said, America is
great because America is good. He said this probably 100, 150 years
ago. He did not say that America was rich or powerful or perfect, but
he said America was good and that is why America was great. I think
America still is good, and I think America is great; but I would say
that there are some signs on the horizon, some storm clouds that would
lead us to wonder a little bit where we are headed and to cause us to
sit up and pay attention.
What can be done? It is easy to state the problems, we hear that all
the time, particularly around here, what is wrong. It seems to me, Mr.
Speaker, that you do not leave an issue without at least setting out
some possible solutions. One thing that I would submit that makes sense
to me is the issue of mentoring. We cannot legislate strong families,
we cannot legislate morality; but one thing that we can do is provide a
mentor in the life of a young person who badly needs it. It is assumed
that at the present time in our culture there are roughly 18 million
young people who lack a stable, caring adult in their life and badly
need a mentor. What is a mentor? A mentor, number one, is someone who
cares, someone who has no ax to grind, someone who simply cares enough
to show up and spend time with that person. He is not a father, not a
mother, not a grandparent, not a preacher, not a teacher, no one who is
paid to do this; but it is someone who simply cares enough to be there
with that child and provide stability and a caring environment and a
stable relationship in the life of a young person who probably does not
know what that looks like.
The second thing that a mentor does is he affirms. I guess I saw that
very clearly in athletics. If you told a player that you really
believed in him, that you really thought that he could amount to
something, that someday he had a future with you, oftentimes he would
grow into that which he did not know that he was even capable of being.
On the other hand, if you said, you know, I really do not think that
you are going to make it, son, we do not really think we have a place
for you here, his performance would begin to tail off and pretty soon
he would play down to that level of expectation and he would be gone.
So affirmation is critical. No one can live without some type of
affirmation, whether you are 50 years old or whether you are 30 or
whether you are 10. A mentor is someone who says, I believe in you. I
really think you can do this. And you are important to me. A mentor is
one who affirms.
Also, thirdly, a mentor is one who provides some guidance. So many
young people that we have today have never seen anyone in their
immediate family or their immediate life who has graduated from high
school, maybe no one who has held down a steady job, no one who has a
concept of what it is like to be a good parent. A mentor is someone who
provides some guidance and says, I believe in you. I think you can do
this. I think you can graduate from high school. I think you could make
it in this college, or I think you would be really good at this.
Guidance is critical. Mentoring works. It reduces dropout rates by
roughly 100 percent, reduces drug and alcohol abuse by 50 percent,
teenage pregnancy by 40 percent, violent acts by roughly 30 percent,
and improves relations with peers and parents, improves self-esteem.
Even though it is not perfect, it is the best thing that we know of,
the best opportunity that we have to begin to rectify some of those
relationships that have been so badly broken and have damaged those
young people so badly.
The President has proposed currently $450 million over the next 3
years for mentoring. That is $150 million a year; $100 million would go
for mentoring for all children and $50 million would be designated for
children of prisoners. If that program is enacted, and I hope Congress
will do that, I hope it will be funded, that will reach 1 million young
people. That still leaves 17 million that are not being reached. But
mentoring is cost effective, because a good mentoring program will cost
$300 to $500 per child per year. It costs $30,000 to lock somebody up.
As we mentioned earlier, a meth addict, someone who commits 130 crimes,
would be almost difficult if not impossible to total up the dollars.
What we are doing in our society today is we are spending huge amounts
of money on the back end, and we are losing person after person after
person, the recidivism rate is about 85 percent, and we are not
spending the money on the front end where we can really make a
difference. Mentoring is something that we think is a possible
solution, at least a partial solution.
The President has been talking about the Call to Service Act. This is
legislation which encourages volunteerism in our country. One of the
greatest resources that we have in this country today is our senior
citizens. We have so many people who have retired in their late 50s or
in their 60s, and they are going to live until they are 80 or 90 years
old and they are still healthy and they are still vibrant. The greatest
need that we have in our country today is extended family. Our kids
growing up do not have grandparents, some do not have parents at all;
and so we feel that the Call to Service Act can certainly be used to
hook up people who will volunteer, who have some life experience to
help our young people, to mentor them, to tutor them, to be supportive;
and we think this is a tremendous opportunity.
The Internet gambling bill was passed today on this floor. I hope
that it will have some success over in the other body. As a culture, we
are trying to gamble our way to prosperity. The difficult thing is that
it impoverishes those who can least afford to gamble, breaks up
families, directs money from children's needs. It is tied to organized
crime, and students are particularly susceptible. One thing that we
noticed on Internet gambling is that the most high-risk group of people
in our country is students. All you need is a computer and a credit
card. Most college students and an awful lot of high school students
have that and the more times that you gamble in a short period of time
and the less troublesome it is to do it, which Internet gambling
provides the optimal situation, the more addictive it becomes. For some
it has the same addictive effect as crack cocaine. So a certain
percentage of our young people are getting addicted very quickly. This
is a powerful issue, and I believe that the Internet gambling bill if
it is passed in the other body can certainly be a tremendous help.
We eliminated the marriage tax penalty which was certainly
countercultural to tell people that if you live together, you are going
to have less tax consequences, it is going to save you $1,000 or $1,500
a year as opposed to if you were married just makes no sense, because
marriage is the basic family unit in this country. We have rectified to
some degree that particular marriage penalty.
I think it is really critical that we fund drug prevention programs.
Let me just mention one here, Mr. Speaker. Byrne grants. Byrne grants
go out to fight meth. It is amazing how much
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methamphetamines cost. If you find a meth lab, to get that dismantled
and all the chemicals disposed of costs thousands and thousands of
dollars. So if we do not fund this, and right now it is not scheduled
to be funded, this is a tremendous blow to our culture and particularly
to our rural areas where most of these meth labs occur. We need to make
sure that we are giving people the tools that they need.
H.R. 669, the Protect Children From Video Game Sex and Violence Act
of 2003. I am its cosponsor. I think this is certainly one that can
correct some of the problems of video games. H.R. 756, the Child
Modeling Exploitation Prevention Act, addresses the issue of some
people trying to get around the child pornography statutes by having
children pose as models in provocative poses, and so this addresses
that.
Above all, Mr. Speaker, we need a fundamental shift in the way that
we address first amendment rights in the courts. This is a dangerous
statement for somebody to make, that we have got to watch out for the
first amendment. Everybody is in favor of free speech and the first
amendment, and I certainly go along with that as well; but I would like
to point out some things that have happened in the courts in recent
years that I think have been very damaging to this culture.
In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act that made it
illegal to send indecent material to children via the Internet. Listen
to what happened to that, Mr. Speaker. In June of 1997, the Supreme
Court overturned portions of the law and made this statement. They
said, indecent material is protected by the first amendment. And so
what we are saying is those who produce indecent material have
protection, and yet those children who receive that material and are
influenced by it have no protection.
In 1996, the Child Pornography Prevention Act outlawed child
pornography, including visual depictions that appeared to be of a minor
and so it may not actually be a minor involved; but it could be a
computer-generated image, or it could be an adult posing as a minor and
how do you know? The Supreme Court ruled that unconstitutional and
overturned the law banning computer graphics showing child pornography.
In October 1998, the Children Online Protection Act was signed into
law to prohibit the communication of harmful material to children on
publicly accessible Web sites. It makes sense that you should not be
able to on publicly accessible Web sites send pornography to children.
Yet the Supreme Court refused to rule on the 1998 law. As a result, it
was never enacted; and it still sits there today and is void.
The 106th Congress passed the Child Internet Protection Act to
require schools and libraries that receive Federal funds to use
Internet filtering to protect minors from harmful material on the
Internet.
{time} 2130
In May of 2002, the Federal court declared the law unconstitutional.
Free speech is protected, while women and children are attacked.
It is important to note that 80 to 90 percent of rapists and
pedophiles reported using pornography usually right before they commit
the act, and they will admit that this has shaped their behavior and
made a difference. It seems to me our women and children ought to have
rights and freedoms as well, and yet it seems the way we have phrased
the argument that they are being victimized, whereas others who are
perpetrators are being given freedoms to do so.
The Court has often ruled against school prayer. I would not do so
necessarily, but some have traced some of the cultural decline I have
mentioned tonight to the absence of school prayer, which began I
believe in the 1960s. But there have been some decisions that really
caused me to wonder. I will mention some of these.
In 1992, the Supreme Court declared an invocation and benediction at
a graduation ceremony unconstitutional. On the floor of this House,
every day we start with a prayer. In many public places, prayer is
used. And yet at a school graduation it is not legitimate to have a
minister, a priest, a rabbi, a cleric say a prayer. Again, this seems
to fly in the face of the way our country was founded.
The Court also has held that a minute of silence in school is
unconstitutional. Now, a child may spend a minute of silence and may
say a prayer, may look out the window, may think about the upcoming
test. He is not forced to believe in any doctrine. He is not forced to
pray. Yet the Court said that a minute of silence is unconstitutional.
The Court also ruled not long ago that a student-led prayer at a
football game was unconstitutional. The students voted in this
particular student body to have a prayer. They wanted a student-led
prayer before the game. The Court said this would really violate the
rights of the football players who had to be there and also some of the
cheerleaders required to be there. Yet this violated the rights I think
of those who chose to have the prayer, the students themselves.
As most people understand, the words ``under God'' were struck from
the Pledge of Allegiance by the Ninth Circuit court. Most of the
framers of the Constitution obviously mentioned time and time again
their dependence upon God, and yet we are trying to strip this away
also from our Pledge of Allegiance.
I am not going to get into the abortion issue at any great length. It
is very controversial. I realize there are many people on both sides of
the issue. But I will mention one thing.
Just recently Congress and this House passed the partial-birth
abortion ban. The reason I do not think this is particularly
controversial is that this particular ban I believe drew something like
84 votes in the affirmative on the Senate side, and we had a fairly
large majority here, and we saw a great many people who are for
abortion, who are pro-choice, in quotes, vote for this ban. They were
beginning to get the idea of how barbaric it really is.
So this was something where there has been a real shift. Currently
70-some percent of Americans do not favor partial-birth abortion; and
many of them, as I said earlier, are in favor of abortion. Yet this
particular law, I am sure, will be challenged in the courts, and there
is a fair chance it may be overturned as somehow being
unconstitutional.
So we have seen a steady erosion of the culture by some decisions
that have been made in the courts. The reason I think this is so
important to bring up today is that some people cannot understand why
there is so much controversy over in the other body regarding the
appointment of judges and justices; and the reason is that what is at
stake, I believe, is the future course in many of these issues,
particularly in moral issues, that our country is going to take. So
these are monumental issues, and the shape of the Supreme Court, the
shape of our district courts, our courts of appeal, are going to go a
long ways in deciding what this country abides by in upcoming years.
Mr. Speaker, this country was founded upon principles of dependence
upon God, a recognition that life is sacred, the importance of sound
character, and the fact that children are our most important assets.
There is no question that we are involved in a cultural and spiritual
struggle of Titanic proportions. This struggle may present the greatest
crisis facing the United States today, as I have outlined I think
fairly clearly.
As Congress addresses critical issues such as national defense, the
economy and health care, which we certainly need to spend a lot of time
on, it is critical that we not lose sight of the fact that our Nation's
survival is directly linked to the character of our people, and
particularly our young people. I say it again, our Nation's survival,
long-term, will rest primarily upon the character of our people.
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