[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2000 years ago, we found that the Roman empire had superseded Greece, 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.

[[Page H5168]]

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.

                              {time}  2100

  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

[[Page H5170]]

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

[[Page H5171]]

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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