[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.