[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 38 (Wednesday, March 24, 2004)]
[House]
[Page H1376]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           SUPREME COURT TO RULE ON PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE CASE

  (Mr. PENCE asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. PENCE. Mr. Speaker, Thomas Jefferson wrote those transcendent 
words in the Declaration of Independence, that our founders believed 
that we were endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. 
Abraham Lincoln, in establishing the first National Day of Prayer, 
quoted scripture as he affirmed that which had been truth throughout 
the ages, that only those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.
  Nevertheless, at this hour across the street the Supreme Court of the 
United States of America is hearing a case about whether the American 
people may acknowledge that we are one Nation under God in our Pledge 
of Allegiance. This case today I offer, Mr. Speaker, is less about the 
facts than it is about who we are as a Nation, a Nation with a Congress 
that opened this day in prayer, and a court, a Supreme Court, that 
actually opened their work today with the words ``God save the United 
States and this honorable court,'' about a government that displays the 
name of God throughout its buildings and in its best traditions, 
telling the American people that they cannot do likewise.
  Let us hope and pray that those nine jurists on the Supreme Court see 
the freedom of religion and not the freedom from religion in the first 
amendment of our Constitution.

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