[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 3393-3396]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          FREEDOM OF RELIGION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2015, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Gohmert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, to hear my friend Mr. Rothfus talk about 
the Little Sisters of the Poor--I have not met them personally as he 
has. I don't know them personally as he does, but it is rather clear 
they bear a great deal of resemblance in the way they carry themselves, 
in the way they help others, in the way they are incredibly selfless, 
that they are living their lives

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truly committed to doing what Jesus said when he said: If you love me, 
you will tend my sheep.
  These Little Sisters of the Poor, these Catholic nuns, since I 
haven't met them personally and dealt with them personally, as the 
gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Rothfus), my friend, has, I take it 
from his description and from what I have seen of them on television 
and heard them speak on radio and television and in the written media, 
these are precious, extraordinary women, the kind of people about which 
Jesus spoke when he said: They will inherit the Earth.
  Unfortunately, between that time when they inherit all things, they 
have to endure the slings and arrows of people who ridicule and 
persecute Christians for their beliefs. It is so remarkable that we are 
supposed to have this incredibly educated judiciary, this incredibly 
educated group of people in the United States, when, as I have heard 
repeatedly in my district over the last few months, you know, there is 
sense, s-e-n-s-e, in Washington and at the Capitol, but it's not common 
sense there.
  It is common sense where the Little Sisters of the Poor are located. 
It is common sense where I live in Texas, common sense among the 12 
counties that I travel constantly. There are places around the country 
it is common sense, but not here, because the people around the country 
can read the First Amendment to our Constitution. It says Congress 
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or 
prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
  This is a Nation, according to our Founders, who had a tremendous 
amount to say about our foundation. I know that we have had people 
educated to the level of Ph.D.--perhaps even beyond, whatever that is--
and yet they have not gotten a complete education of the basis on which 
this Nation was founded. They have been convinced by people who have 
taken tiny little parts of our founding and seen little trees and 
shrubs and ignored the forest.
  If people on the Supreme Court and in our Federal court system would 
dare to look at a full history of this Nation, they might actually read 
what the Pilgrims themselves said in their own writing, their own 
agreement, because in 1620, November 11, 1620--I am quoting from the 
Pilgrims:
  ``In the name of God, Amen . . . having undertaken, for the glory of 
God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our king and 
country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of 
Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of 
God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a 
civil body politick.''
  Or how about September 26, 1642, some educational institution called 
Harvard that has also been educating people out of common sense. Thank 
God there are people who have graduated from Harvard and have been able 
to maintain some level of common sense. But Harvard said:
  ``Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to 
consider well the main end of his life and studies is to know God and 
Jesus Christ, which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay 
Christ in the bottom as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and 
learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisdom, let every one 
seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seek it of Him (Proverbs 
2:3).''
  Or how about this entry in George Washington's prayer book. Perhaps 
some of our courts' liberal judges, some of them have probably heard of 
George Washington, and I know in some of our schools we have had to 
drop the study of real history because they are teaching to the 
ridiculous test that some bureaucrats think should be appropriate 
because the Federal Government has gotten too involved and gone beyond 
what the Constitution allows them to require and do. But George 
Washington's prayer book included this prayer:
  ``O, most glorious God and Jesus Christ, I acknowledge and confess my 
faults in the weak and imperfect performance of the duties of this day. 
I called on Thee for pardon and forgiveness of sins, but so coldly and 
carelessly that my prayers are come my sin and stand in need of pardon. 
I have heard Thy holy word, but with such deadness of spirit that I 
have been an unprofitable and forgetful hearer . . . Let me live 
according to those holy rules which Thou hast this day prescribed in 
Thy holy word. Direct me to the true object, Jesus Christ, the way, the 
truth and life. Bless, O Lord, all the people of this land.''
  Wow. That was the father of our country, in his prayer book that is.
  So I think about the wisdom. Proverbs says fear the Lord's beginning 
of wisdom, and I think about the wisdom of a lady who is not that well 
formally educated, Ms. Milam in Mount Pleasant, Texas, one of my 
mother's best friends.
  My late mother had some awesome friends, and I loved to hear them 
talk.
  Ms. Milam's daughter, Emma Lou, was talking to her mother, Ms. Milam, 
and it was my great honor when I was able to drive as a 14-year-old and 
Ms. Milam would call over and tell my mother: Tell Louie I have got 
some homemade rolls.
  And I would head over to Ms. Milam's house because they were 
incredible. She had real butter.
  She didn't have a very advanced education. I don't know if she got to 
seventh or eighth grade. I know she didn't go too far at all in school, 
but she was a very, very smart woman. And having discussions, sometimes 
eating rolls and real butter, and hearing the wisdom of this lady--I 
think she was 90, maybe, when she said this, but her daughter was 
talking about someone there in our hometown where I was growing up, 
Mount Pleasant, and she mentioned a guy there.
  Ms. Milam said: He is a fool.
  Emma Lou, her daughter, said: Mother, he has his Ph.D.
  Ms. Milam said: I don't care. He will always be a p-h-u-l, fool.
  There are people in this country, they may have their Ph.D.s, but 
they will always be, as dear Ms. Milam, Emma Lou Leftwhich's mother, 
you say he will still be a p-h-u-l, fool.
  She may not have been the most accurate speller, but she knew a fool 
when she saw and heard one.
  So we have people who have not been properly educated about our 
history, and so they go about miseducating others by telling people 
like me when we were students: By the way, Benjamin Franklin was a 
deist, someone who believes if there was something that created the 
universe and it didn't just all amazingly happen from a big bang or 
whatever--some of us believe there could be a big bang and still have 
been intelligent design to what happened.
  But we were told Ben Franklin, no, he didn't believe that there was a 
God that intervened in the ways of man, that if there was a deity or 
something of force that set things in motion, that that thing, force, 
deity, whatever it is, if it still exists, it never interferes with the 
laws of nature, the ways of man. It just lets everything play out, so 
we are on our own.
  But if you look at the words Ben Franklin wrote and spoke himself, we 
know what he said in 1787, June, at the Constitutional Convention, 
because he was asked for a copy. He wrote it down. Madison took notes, 
but Franklin wrote it down. In part, he says--and, of course, he was 80 
years old, a couple years away from meeting his Judge, his Maker. This 
brilliant man said:
  ``I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more 
convincing proofs I see of this truth--that God governs in the affairs 
of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His''--
God's--``notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his 
aid?''

                              {time}  1430

  ``We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings that `except the 
Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.'''
  He said:
  ``I firmly believe this; and I also believe that, without His 
concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better 
than the builders of Babel; we shall be divided by our little partial 
local interests . . . and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a 
byword down to future ages.''
  This is a man who is one of the greatest Founders of this country, 
who made

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clear, standing before all of these brilliant people in Philadelphia 
and the little Independence Hall and told them unashamedly that if we 
do not invoke God's help here in our effort to put together a 
Constitution that this country will work and live under, then we will 
succeed no better than the builders of Babel. It will all come crashing 
down, as the Tower of Babel did.
  Yet we get far enough from that amazing speech in 1787--and yes, it 
is true that because they didn't have a treasury; they didn't have 
money; they weren't getting paid; they weren't able to hire a chaplain, 
as they had throughout the Revolution. The Continental Congress had a 
chaplain that led in prayer every day before they started.
  They didn't have money. They didn't have a treasury. They couldn't 
hire a chaplain. There were denominations of Christians there that 
didn't trust other members to do a prayer that was satisfactory for 
all, so they all had to hire a chaplain during the Continental Congress 
days to do the prayer for everyone, that they could all be assured was 
a fair prayer to each of the Christian sects. Even the Quakers would 
not get upset if they picked the right Christian chaplain. So that is 
what they did.
  But it is true, after Franklin made this speech, that it was pointed 
out they have got no money. They can't hire a chaplain. So they will 
get to that later--and later, they did. Because since that first day 
that Congress was sworn in, in 1789, in Federal Hall there in New York, 
right after George Washington put his hand on his own Bible and added 
the words to the end of his oath of office ``so help me God,'' he goes 
in, he makes a brief speech--back in those days, they did that, a brief 
speech--to Congress. Then they all went down to St. Paul's Chapel, 
which is still there, that was protected from the concrete and debris 
and steel--all those things that came flying--totally protected by a 
sycamore tree that fell there in the cemetery. It was totally 
protected--even the fragile stained glass windows--from any harm.
  The chapel where George Washington and the first Congress, after they 
were sworn in, came down Wall Street and actually had a prayer service 
together in St. Paul's Chapel.
  Is it any wonder that, after 9/11, the only building that was not 
harmed in what was considered part of Ground Zero was St. Paul's 
Chapel, where that first prayer session came together? Jonathan Cahn 
has written eloquently about that.
  When I was there a few months after 9/11, that is where everybody was 
bringing their wreaths and their messages that just broke your heart: 
Has anyone seen this person? It is St. Paul's Chapel.
  It is not just me that says it. But let's go to another of our 
Founders. A lot of people don't know that he was a Founder, Noah 
Webster.
  In 1783, Noah Webster wrote and published the first book on proper 
spelling for words, which eventually morphed into our dictionary. 
Generation after generation has learned at the hands of Noah Webster, 
and a lot of people don't realize what an important role Noah Webster 
had as a thinker, as a brilliant man, as a confidant to George 
Washington, as a confidant to Alexander Hamilton, another of our 
Founders.
  But that brilliant man, Noah Webster, said this:
  ``The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought 
to form the basis of all of our civil constitutions and laws. All the 
miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, 
injustice, oppression, slavery, and war, proceed from their despising 
or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.''
  Wow.
  Of course, Jedidiah Morse, the father of American geography, as he is 
called, and the father of Samuel B. Morse, stated:
  ``Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our 
present republican forms of government, and all the blessings which 
flow from them, must fall with them.''
  Of course, this is what the Supreme Court has been doing, the very 
thing that our Founders, including this direct statement of Jedidiah 
Morse made: when the pillars of Christianity fall, then self-government 
is going to fall with it.
  And that is why John Adams had made the point that he did, that this 
form of government is intended only for a religious and moral people. 
It is totally ineffective to govern any other kind.
  Yes, they had some things wrong. No one should have been enslaved 
when a Constitution and a Bill of Rights were adopted, as it was. No 
one should have been. People should have been treated equally--not by 
behavior or conduct, because there have to be laws governing behavior 
and conduct and choices--but regarding things that you have no control 
over: race, creed, color, gender, national origin. And it took a little 
while to get that right.
  People talk about Jefferson. People say he didn't even believe in 
God. Are you kidding me? Jefferson, whose memorial is not far from this 
very Capitol--a beautiful dome overlooking the Tidal Basin--has 
inscribed on the walls:
  ``Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a 
conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?''
  John Quincy Adams, our youngest diplomat in the history of the United 
States, appointed by George Washington. Became President in the 
election of 1824. He was the only person to have been President and, 
after he was President--defeated in 1828 by Andrew Jackson--runs for 
Congress in 1830. Nobody ever did that before or since. Why would 
anybody run for Congress after they had been President?
  Well, in the case of John Quincy Adams, it was because he believed 
God had called him to do what William Wilberforce was doing and had 
almost completed doing in the British Empire, and that is, eliminating 
slavery because of his beliefs of the teachings in the Bible.
  By the way, John Quincy Adams overlapped with Lincoln for about a 
year just down the hall here. We now call it Statuary Hall. It has got 
a brass plate where his desk was. There is a brass plate where a 
skinny, not that handsome guy sat in the very back for 2 years, 
overlapped with Adams.
  I asked the historian Steve Mansfield about this. He said, there is 
no question about it that Abraham Lincoln, sitting at the back of 
Statuary Hall--the back of the House Chamber down the hall, listening 
to the speeches of John Quincy Adams over and over about the evils of 
slavery and how in the world could we expect God to continue blessing 
America when we are putting brothers and sisters in chains? He said, 
there is no question; those speeches materially affected Lincoln more 
than anything else in his 2 brief years in the House of 
Representatives, so much so that after the compromise of 1850 and 
slavery appeared to be perpetuated, that eventually he had to get back 
involved in politics to try to get rid of slavery.
  Why? Because Lincoln, who started as an infidel, as Mansfield's book 
``Lincoln's Battle With God'' points out, he bragged about being an 
infidel in the early 1820s. But by the time he became President, he had 
no question whatsoever: There is a God Almighty who has control of the 
universe. He does let us make free choices. And Lincoln felt like he 
may have made some wrong choices that contributed to trouble in the 
country that broke his heart, caused him depression. But he believed.
  He was materially affected by the man who believed that God had 
called him to bring an end to slavery. And in obedient response to what 
he believed was God's calling, he materially affected that young 
freshman sitting at the back of Statuary Hall to the point that he 
ended up being the leader that brought about the end of slavery.
  My friend from Pennsylvania (Mr. Rothfus) was quoting from and 
relating to Martin Luther King, Jr. What was he? He was an ordained 
Christian minister who believed in God, who believed in the saving 
grace of Jesus Christ, just like the little Sisters of the Poor, who 
have dedicated their lives to helping others who don't have the ability 
to care for themselves. They have spent so much of their lives that 
would

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equate to millions and millions of dollars providing health care and 
help to people in need.
  And what happens? We have, as Thomas Jefferson related, gotten so far 
from remembering where our rights come from that this Nation is in 
peril of continuing to stay free.
  You have other statements. John Quincy Adams says:
  ``The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: It connected 
in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the 
principles of Christianity.''
  From the day of the Declaration, they--the American people--were 
bound by the laws of God and by the laws of the gospel which they 
nearly all acknowledged as the rules of their conduct.
  Well, certainly.
  Under the freedom of religion in our First Amendment that was adopted 
June 15, 1790, nobody can be forced to become a Christian. God gives us 
free choice. And that is part of the foundation of this Nation and the 
freedoms. And the minute that a majority of this country think our 
freedoms come from a government, those freedoms are gone.
  The Nation--at least a majority--must accept that our freedoms are a 
gift from God that should be protected by the government, and the 
minute a majority believes otherwise, then it is--as defendants used to 
say, after they were sentenced in my court, sometimes they would say: 
It is all over but the slow talking and the low walking.
  And so it will be over for this Nation when a majority believes that 
freedom is something this government in Washington gives benevolently 
to us. Because once that belief is a majority belief, then the 
government giveth and the government taketh away.

                              {time}  1445

  What that government will find, as every government that has ever 
been instituted, whether king, dictator, emperor, Parliament, Congress, 
it ultimately will always find that when you do not know the basis, the 
foundation of the world, then your government will not last just a 
whole lot longer. That is why the Founders kept trying to make sure we 
understood this.
  Alexis de Tocqueville, that my friend, Mr. Rothfus, referenced, who 
came over here to do a study of what was making America so special and 
great. This one is not often quoted, but it is a quote from 1835:

       There is no country in the world where the Christian 
     religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men 
     than in America, and there can be no greater proof of its 
     utility and of its conformity to human nature than that its 
     influence is powerfully felt over the most enlightened and 
     free nation of the Earth.

  There are so many quotes that are part of our history. Franklin 
Roosevelt, 1935, says:

       We cannot read the history of our rising development as a 
     nation, without reckoning with the place the Bible has 
     occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic. Where we 
     have been the truest and most consistent in obeying its 
     precepts, we have attained the greatest measure of 
     contentment and prosperity.

  It was the Ambassador to the U.N. from Lebanon, and later President 
of the U.N. of the General Assembly said this in 1958, ``Whoever tries 
to conceive the American word without taking full account of the 
suffering and love of salvation of Christ is only dreaming.
  ``I know how embarrassing this matter is to politicians, bureaucrats, 
businessmen and cynics, but whatever these honored men think, the 
irrefutable truth is that the soul of America is at its best and 
highest Christian.''
  But you don't have to be a Christian. You can be an atheist, 
agnostic, Buddhist, Muslim, whatever you want to be, as long as the 
Constitution and the Bill of Rights is foremost in your guiding 
principle here in this country.
  But this administration has done what really would be unthinkable in 
any other administration. It basically has an undeclared--publicly 
undeclared war against Christianity. And it has sown seeds around the 
world so that when I have met and wept with people, victims in Nigeria 
and around the world, they don't understand why America doesn't stand 
up against Christian genocide around the world and their suffering. 
Because when you look, the United States Government will litigate 
against the Little Sisters of the Poor, Mother Teresa, basically, and 
say: You have got to believe what we tell you to believe. You have got 
to practice the religious beliefs we tell you to believe. We don't care 
how moral and Christian and wonderful and humble and helpful you have 
been. We don't care. You are going to do what the new God of this 
country says, the five majority on the Supreme Court. That is the new 
God.
  It is about marriage. It is about everything else. Until the five 
majority in the Supreme Court wake up and allow freedom of religion not 
to be prohibited, consistent with the First Amendment of the United 
States Constitution, then we have not a whole lot of time left as a 
free people.
  As an Australian group told me, if something happens to the United 
States, forget trying to come to Australia. We are gone as soon as you 
are.
  It is time we stand up and make sure religious freedom lives again 
completely free in America.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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