[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 5]
[House]
[Page 7024]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     WE NEED PRAYER IN OUR SCHOOLS

  (Mr. TRAFICANT asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. TRAFICANT. Mr. Speaker, I want to associate myself with the 
remarks of our distinguished Speaker and his leadership.
  We have another school tragedy now in Colorado. Experts are calling 
for more money, more police, more counselors, and certainly that would 
be a help. But I think there is something else fundamentally missing.
  In America, when our schools can teach about Hitler and war but we 
cannot discuss God, something is very wrong, I say to my colleagues. 
Not to use this great tragedy as the catalyst for a proposition we 
should be considering, but I believe school prayer should be strongly 
considered by this body. People who pray together are not likely, 
through history, to kill one another. I believe it is a reasonable 
thing to pursue. It may not be the total answer, but it is a start in 
the right direction.
  Let me remind Members that the Constitution may separate church and 
state, but it was never intended to separate God and the American 
people. We all pray for the families and grieve for the victims.

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