    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
    [November 20, 1997]
    [Pages 1615-1617]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the Ecumenical Breakfast
    November 20, 1997

        Thank you very much, and welcome to the White House. I am delighted
    to see you all. Let me say that we do want to talk about the obligation
    imposed on all of us to secure a future in which all of us are a part.
        But in light of developments in the last day in Iraq, I would like
    to say just a word about that. The meeting of the foreign ministers last
    night in Geneva strongly reaffirmed our unanimous position: Saddam
    Hussein must comply unconditionally with the will of the international
    community and allow all the weapons inspectors back to Iraq so they can
    get on with doing their jobs without interference. After that meeting,
    he said he would do that. In the coming days we will wait and see
    whether he does, in fact, comply with the will of the international
    community.
        I just want to reiterate that the United States must remain and will
    remain resolute in our determination to prevent him from threatening his
    neighbors or the world with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.
    This is an issue that I hope will become even more important to all
    Americans and a greater subject of discussion. We must do that. That is
    the duty we have to our children.
        Now, let me say I look forward to these meetings every year. I have
    done, I think, one or two breakfasts like this every year I've been
    President. And even though we're discussing a kind of public issue
    today, I get a lot of personal solace out of this, and it always helps
    me sort of to put things back in perspective. And to give you an idea of
    how badly we in Washington need things put in perspective here, I got a
    cartoon out of The New Yorker magazine that is a doctor talking to a
    patient. You might imagine that the patient is anyone who spends 60
    hours a week or more working in this city. The

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    doctor is talking to the patient and he said, ``Before we try assisted
    suicide, Mrs. Rose, let's give the aspirin a chance.'' [Laughter] I
    wouldn't say that you're the aspirin--[laughter]--you will alleviate
    even that, I think.
        I'd also like to thank so many of you for the work you've done with
    us on public issues: on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and after
    the Supreme Court struck it down, on the Federal Executive order I
    issued, going as far as I could with my executive authority to apply the
    principles of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to Federal
    employees. I thank those of you who worked with Secretary Riley and the
    Justice Department on the very important work we did to try to clarify
    the lines of religious expression for students and teachers in our
    public schools. That, I think, did a great deal of good, and I know that
    Secretary Riley recently had a summit of religious and education leaders
    in St. Petersburg to talk about what can be done within the schools to
    promote racial harmony and to raise performance.
        I thank you for the work that many of you have done with us to
    support the cause of religious freedom around the world. That has
    become, I think, a very significant issue for many of you in this room
    and many Americans. And of course, it's still a very important issue--
    regrettably, it's an important issue in many nations around the world
    and one that we have to keep working away at.
        I also would like to thank you for some of your--some of you have
    been involved in the America Reads program. I know that the church
    Hillary and I attend here in Washington regularly has 45 volunteers. I
    got the newsletter just the other day and the pastor noted that I was
    not yet one of them. [Laughter]
        Many of our religious groups are working on the Welfare to Work
    Partnership. We have 2,500 private companies now in that effort who have
    pledged to hire people from welfare to work, and they're doing a
    marvelous job. But very often the houses of worship provide incredibly
    important services for families and children in transition efforts. This
    is working. We have 3.8 million fewer people on welfare than we did the
    day I became President, about almost 2 million fewer people since I
    signed the welfare reform bill a couple of years ago. And because of the
    way the system works, our States have even more money now to spend on
    education and child care and job placement and other supports, which
    makes the opportunity for people who care about the poor in our society
    who today are disabled from entering the mainstream of American life
    that much greater, to make sure that even the people that we thought
    hardest to place could succeed.
        Today I do want to talk about our racial initiatives. When I started
    this, a lot of people said, ``Why are you doing this? There's not any
    riot in the cities.'' There are some examples of racial discord; we know
    a fair number of the church bombings--or burnings appear to have been
    racially motivated. But people said, ``Well, why are you doing this?'' I
    think that it is a sign of strength if a society can examine its
    problems before they become a festering sore that people who are
    otherwise uninvolved have to face. I also believe that one of our
    obligations in this administration, as we bring this century to a close
    and begin a whole new millennium, is to think about those things which
    we will be dealing with for the next generation, those things which, if
    we respond properly, can change the whole texture of life in America for
    the better.
        And also, just because there's not any civil discord that's apparent
    doesn't mean we don't have a lot of serious problems. If you look at the
    fact that juvenile crime has not gone down nearly as much as crime among
    adults, if you look at what's happening to the exploding prison
    population in America and the racial implications of that, if you look
    at the fact that we still have disparities among our various racial
    groups in the credit practices of banks and the access to higher
    education and the earnings in the workplace and the increasing
    relationship of that to success as young people in education, it is
    clear that our attempt to keep making progress toward the American dream
    requires us to make progress on the issues of race and all those that
    are related.
        And if you look back over the entire history of America, we started
    with a Constitution that we couldn't live up to--just like none of us
    live up perfectly to the Holy Scriptures that we profess to believe in.
    And our whole life as a nation has been an effort punctuated by crisis
    after crisis after crisis, to move our collective life closer to what we
    said we believed in over 200 years ago. And that kind of change always
    requires spiritual depth, spiritual resources, spiritual conviction.
    After all, we said all men are created equal, but you can't vote

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    unless you're a white male landowner. I mean, that's where we started.
    We're a long way from that today. And we saw all the efforts to move
    beyond all those barriers very often in spiritual terms.
        So where are we today? Well, first of all, America has become
    markedly more diverse racially. And that means we're becoming markedly
    more diverse culturally and in religious terms, as well. Today, Hawaii
    is the only State in which no racial group is in a majority. But within
    a few years, our largest State, California, with 13 percent of our
    population, will not have--even Americans of European descent will not
    be in the majority there. Within probably 50 years, but perhaps sooner,
    there will be no single racial group in a majority in the entire United
    States.
        Now, the scholars have said for 200 years that America was not about
    a race or a place, it was about an idea. We're about to find out.
    [Laughter] And we had best be ready. Across the river here in Fairfax
    County, Virginia, is one of the 5 school districts in America with
    children from over 100 different racial or ethnic or national groups--
    180 different national and ethnic groups in the Fairfax County School
    District. Their native languages number 100. We want them all to learn
    to speak and to read and to function in English and to be able to do
    very well in school and to be able to make a contribution to our
    American way of life.
        And as I said, it has religious implications. I attended--right
    before I was inaugurated this last time, I went to a Southern Baptist
    church service, early service on Sunday, where the minister was a man
    from Arkansas who had been a friend of mine there. And he said, ``This
    is a little different from the church I had in Arkansas.'' He said,
    ``I've got a Korean ministry here. I have so many Korean members. And I
    have to run an English as a second language course in the church every
    night.'' And of course, most of the people who come here from Asia are
    not Southern Baptists. [Laughter] I mean, some may think that's--
    Reverend Dunn said, thank God. [Laughter] I'm sure he's the only one of
    you not seeking to increase his flock. [Laughter]
        But this changes things--this changes things. Things that are deeply
    embedded in the culture, for example, of the African-American church,
    elemental aspects of American culture that in some ways made African-
    Americans, even in the midst of their oppression, the most socially
    cohesive of Americans, thanks to the African-American church, will be
    foreign to a lot of the new Americans that are coming in here not part
    of that tradition, not being caught up in it.
        How will they react if they're subject to systematic discrimination?
    How will they react if they can't get a loan at a bank, even though
    they're honest and have a record of honesty and success? How will we
    deal with all these things, and how we can avoid it? And most of all--
    and a lot of you are involved in these things--how we can get our
    children, early, to know that they can live in a different way, and in
    so doing, to teach their parents--which we see over and over and over
    again can have a very valuable impact.
        Well, these are just some of the things that I wanted to mention,
    and we'll talk about it after breakfast. But the fundamental issue is,
    we know what we're going to look like; the demographers can tell us
    that. But they can't tell us what we're going to be like. That's a
    decision we have to make. And I am persuaded that we will be an
    infinitely better, stronger nation if that decision is informed by,
    driven by, embraced by, and advanced by people of faith in our country.
    And so that's why I asked you here today, and I thank you very much.
        Now I would like to invite Dr. Thomas White Wolf Fassett to give the
    invocation. Then I would like for you to enjoy breakfast, and we'll have
    a discussion after breakfast.

    Note: The President spoke at 9:23 a.m. in the State Dining Room at the
    White House. In his remarks, he referred to James M. Dunn, executive
    director, Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs; and Dr. Thomas
    White Wolf Fassett, general secretary of the Board of Church and
    Society, United Methodist Church.