    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [September 28, 1999]
    [Pages 1616-1620]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Breakfast With Religious Leaders
    September 28, 1999

        Thank you very much, and good morning. I, first of all, would like
    to thank you for the invocation and let you
    know that, as with many other Americans, we have been thinking about you
    and your people in your church.
        Hillary and I welcome you here today. As you know, the Vice
    President and Mrs. Gore are normally here, but he is often otherwise occupied
    these days. [Laughter] And I hope you will forgive their absence. They
    really wanted to be here.
        I would like to thank Secretary Shalala, Secretary Riley, Jack
    Lew for being here. I would also like to thank
    Barry McCaffrey, the Director of our
    Office of National Drug Control Policy. And to those of you who come
    nearly every year, welcome back. To those of you who are

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    here for the first time, welcome. We are delighted that you are all
    here.
        I have looked forward to this day every year for as long as I have
    been President and we have been doing this. All of you know that, if
    you've come to some of the others, that each one of these days has been
    special. And, as in the 1990's, as America has grown more involved with
    the rest of the world and more diverse, because of our history of
    religious liberty and the way our Constitution has worked, more and more
    religious convictions and affiliations have flowered in our country. And
    you can look around this room today--see, it would be very unusual if
    you could have this kind of gathering in any other country in the world.
    And for that I am profoundly grateful.
        Last year was one of the most difficult years in my life, and this
    occasion, because it has come to mean so much to me, was a very
    difficult one. For those of you who were part of that, I want to express
    my particular appreciation. I'd like to say a special word of thanks to
    my good friend Reverend Wogaman and to
    Gordon MacDonald--I think he is here back
    there--and to Tony Campolo, who is not here,
    who have kept their word to meet with me over the last year, both to
    help me and to hold me accountable. And I have kept my word to meet with
    them and to work with them.
        I would like to say only this about that: I have been profoundly
    moved, as few people have, by the pure power of grace, unmerited
    forgiveness through grace--most of all to my wife and daughter, but to the
    people I work with, to the legions of American people, and to the God in
    whom I believe. And I am very grateful to all of you who have had any
    role in that, and I thank you.
        I also want you to know that we are continuing our work. It is
    interesting and not always comfortable, but always rewarding. And I hope
    you will pray for us as we do.
        What I would like to talk about today, following up on what Hillary
    said when she welcomed you here, is
    what we can do together to deal with the question of violence,
    particularly against our children. And I would like to talk about it
    first of all to say we've been trying to work out what the proper
    relationship is between religious individuals and religious groups, and
    government activity, since we got started as a country.
        We've been working on this for a long time now. It probably will
    always be a work in progress. We don't want to discourage people who are
    in public office from pursuing their own religious convictions and from
    stating them, but we must beware, as those of us who are Christians are
    warned, of practicing piety before others in order to be seen by them.
    We must be humble in this endeavor and work together.
        We also must recognize that there will always be differences of
    opinion, honestly held and earnestly pursued, about what is the proper
    role for the government, what is the proper relationship between church
    and state, in the well-timed and well-used American phrase. But it seems
    to me that there is kind of an emerging consensus about the ways in
    which faith organizations and our government can work together, both at
    the national level and at the State and local levels, in a way that
    reinforce values that are universally held, and increase the leverage of
    the good things that the government is funding.
        I could just mention one or two. Some of you are involved in faith-
    based organizations that have received funding for AmeriCorps slots. We
    now have thousands of young volunteers who have worked in AmeriCorps
    through various faith-based organizations rendering community service. I
    don't think that's a violation of the Constitution's establishment
    clause, and we sure have helped a lot of people out there. And I feel
    good about that.
        Some of you have worked in organizations which have helped poor
    families move from welfare to work, in a way that reinforces not only
    the value of work but the value of family, which is even more important.
    And that's a continuing challenge for us, but I'm encouraged by the
    progress that has been made there.
        Many of you have been involved with us in our efforts to advance the
    cause of religious freedom at home and around the world. I don't know if
    Bob Seiple is here today, but I'm very
    pleased about what we're doing in that, and I'm grateful for the work
    that you have--those of you who have helped us with that. And that
    continues to be a concern of mine in many places throughout the world,
    and I think it will continue to be something the United States will have
    to work and work and work on.
        If you have followed--and I'm sure almost all of you have--the
    recent troubling events in East Timor, you know that there is a
    religious

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    as well as an ethnic element to what is going on there and to the
    difficulties.
        And finally, let me say that as we move toward the millennium, I
    have been very moved by the way many faith-based organizations have
    engaged and challenged those of us in public life to reawaken our
    responsibilities to poor people, both within and beyond our borders.
        A couple of people on the way in today mentioned the global
    initiative to reduce dramatically the debt of the poorest nations in the
    world. And I was very pleased by the recent moves that the IMF and the
    World Bank have made in that direction. The United States has pushed
    very hard for it. It is an entirely appropriate thing to do. But I have
    to tell you, I don't want this to wind up being like our dues to the
    United Nations. Now that we have advocated this and gotten everybody
    else to agree to it, we have to pay our fair share. So I hope all of you
    will help us pass the legislation through Congress to do that.
        There is also much, much more we need to do here at home, especially
    for our children. And I think one of the most wonderful experiences I've
    had as President was taking my so-called new markets tour around the
    country, to Appalachia, to the Mississippi Delta, to the Pine Ridge
    Indian Reservation in South Dakota, to many of our inner-city areas. And
    I intend to continue to do these for the remainder of my term, to
    highlight what we can do, what more we can do to try to get investment
    and opportunity and alleviate poverty among people who have not felt the
    warm glow of this economic prosperity of ours. And there are still
    altogether too many of them.
        But today I want to just focus just for a few minutes, and then
    we'll have breakfast, and then we'll have a talk about it. But I wanted
    to ask you to think about this. And that's why I'm so grateful to our
    pastor, for his invocation, and for, after
    what he's been through, for coming here and sharing with us today.
        All the rage in Washington today is we finally succeeded in getting,
    I think, the general public interested in the so-called Y2K problem. You
    know, we live in a world that is dominated by computers, and now we're
    trying to make sure we're Y2K ready, and everybody just has all these
    horrible scenarios of what might happen when the computers turn to 2000
    and all the old computers revert back to 1900 and what might happen.
    We've been working on this steadily. The United States has worked very
    hard here, and we've worked very hard to help other countries throughout
    the world, and especially to avoid any disasters in military operations,
    in airline operations, things that could really have a profound impact
    on us.
        But I think at this prayer breakfast today I would like to say that
    there is more to getting ready for Y2K than fixing the computers. And
    when this kind of seminal event occurs it gives us the opportunity to
    ask ourselves what it would take to be really ready for the year 2000.
        I don't think it's good enough for us to enter the new century as
    the most prosperous and powerful country in the world, with the lowest
    unemployment rate in 29 years and the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years
    and the first back-to-back budget surpluses in 42 years and the longest
    peacetime expansion ever. That's all very impressive, but I think it's
    worth noting, as I have on occasion before, that when Alexis de
    Tocqueville came here over 150 years ago and traveled around America and
    he noticed how profoundly religious our people were--even though we had
    no government religion, and in fact, government could not interfere with
    it--he thought we were the most religious people on Earth. And after he
    had done a good deal of his tour, de Tocqueville wrote a powerful
    sentence. He said, ``America is great because America is good.'' Not
    rich, not powerful, certainly not perfect, but good.
        And the question I think we ought to focus on today is, are we good
    enough? And if we wanted to be better, what's the most important place
    to start? I think this is especially important when it comes to
    children. There's too much trouble in too many of their lives. Even
    here, the trend lines all look good. You have teen pregnancy, divorce,
    drug abuse, poverty, all going down in America. That's the good news.
    The bad news is that by comparative standards, all these problems are
    still far too rampant, and there are too many children with troubled
    lives.
        We could spend all day talking about those things. But today I would
    like to ask you to focus on this problem of violence, which has
    dominated so many of our headlines in the last 2 years. Now, even here,
    you could say it's a mixed picture. It's true we have the lowest crime
    rate in 26 years, the lowest murder rate in 30 years. But it's also true
    that the crime rate in this country is way too high, much higher than
    virtually any place else.

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        It is true that we have seen over the last 2 years a rash of high-
    profile shootings, often with children as both the victims and the
    perpetrators. The mass killing of innocent people I think has been the
    most painful thing that Hillary and I and Al and Tipper Gore have had to
    deal with in the discharge of our public responsibilities, the bombing
    in Oklahoma City; the school violence at Littleton and so many other
    places; the dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas; the torture
    death of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming; the murder of Won-Joon Yoon outside
    his church in Bloomington, Indiana, on the Fourth of July, and the other
    killings in that spree by a deranged young man who had been a member of
    a so-called church of white supremacy. There were the office killings in
    Atlanta and the family killings associated with it; the shootings at the
    Jewish community center in Los Angeles; the killing of a Filipino
    postalworker in that spree; of course, the recent murderous rampage at
    Wedgewood Baptist Church in Fort Worth.
        Now, some of these crimes were motivated by hatred of the victims,
    because of their race, their religion, their homosexuality. I think we
    must do more to prosecute such crimes. I hope Congress will soon send me
    the hate crimes legislation. But some of these crimes do not fit into
    the category of hate crimes. The murderers were in the grip of some evil
    force or mental illness.
        And, in addition to these high-profile crimes where children were
    involved, we should never forget a couple of other things. Thirteen
    children die in this country every day from gun violence. And because
    they die in ones and twos, in tough neighborhoods and difficult streets,
    sometimes they're not the lead story; sometimes they're not any story on
    the evening news. But their numbers add up. And some of you minister to
    the families of those children.
        Beyond that, children die with truly alarming frequency in this
    country from accidental gun deaths. Yesterday I was in New Orleans, and
    this whole big neighborhood was just almost groaning with grief over the
    death of a much-beloved 4-year-old child who shot himself to death
    playing with a loaded gun he found in his own home.
        Now, can we say America is good enough if we still have the highest
    murder rate in the world and--listen to this--and the rate of accidental
    shooting deaths for children under 15 in the United States is 9 times
    higher than the rate for the other 25 industrialized nations in the
    world combined?
        Now, if you go back to what de Tocqueville said, that America is
    great because America is good, and then you realize somehow we've
    managed to make the most of this incredibly complex, modern economy, it
    seems strange, if the murder rate is higher here and the accidental
    death rate is exponentially higher, why is that? Is that because we're
    not good, but we're evil? Is it because we're not smart, but we're
    stupid?
        We kind of laugh uncomfortably, but it's worth thinking about. I say
    the answer to those questions is, of course not. Some people say, well,
    the reason this happens is we're just not tough enough on offenders,
    whether they commit crimes with guns or let kids get guns or don't take
    good enough care of their guns, that we just ought to punish people
    more. But the truth is we have longer sentences and we keep people in
    jail longer and we've got a higher percentage of our people behind bars
    than I think all the countries in the world but one.
        So that's not a very good explanation. And I have concluded long
    since that the truth is we're in the fix we're in because we don't do
    enough to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children; because
    we don't do enough to lead our children away from violent paths into
    positive paths; and because we don't do enough to intervene in the lives
    of people who are disturbed, angry, unstable, and mentally ill before
    it's too late.
        In all of these areas, I believe that people of faith could do more
    to help those of us in public life, to give our children back their
    childhoods. And I will be very brief about that, and we'll have
    breakfast, and we'll go on with our discussions. I say that because to
    those who say, well, this is about evil, of course, that's right; but
    most of you believe that evil is a darkness within us all that just
    metastasizes and explodes in a few. If America is to be good, at least
    according to my faith, we must do more to prevent and overcome evil with
    good.
        And so it's not enough to say that shootings in Los Angeles and
    Atlanta were evil, or the rampage in Fort Worth was evil. Praying and
    working for peace is good. Starting grassroots campaigns against youth
    violence, as we're now trying to do all across the Nation, that's good.
    Putting more uniform community police officers in our most dangerous
    neighborhoods is good.

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    These gun buy-back programs that are springing up across the country
    that we're trying to help finance here, they're good. And I believe
    passing commonsense gun legislation to keep guns out of the wrong hands
    is a good thing to do.
        I am convinced that the faith community can play a major role in
    protecting our children from violence, in supporting commonsense gun
    legislation, in participating in our campaign against youth violence, in
    forming community partnerships to identify and intervene in the lives of
    people before it is too late.
        On this last point, I had a very good talk with the pastor of the Wedgewood Baptist Church just a few days
    ago. You know, so many of your places of worship and your organizations
    have good counseling and outreach programs. But they're not necessarily
    connected to the mental health networks and the social service networks
    and the law enforcement networks in your community. And I'm convinced a
    lot of these people are known to be profoundly disturbed by others well
    before they go out and kill people. And somehow--and also a lot of these
    people--especially this is true of men, I think--are still really hung
    up about asking for help. I know about that. That's a hard thing for men
    to do. I know about that.
        And I think there are a lot of people who would maybe be less
    reluctant to ask for help from someone like you than to show up at the
    social service office of the government, or walk right through the front
    door of a psychiatrist's or a psychologist's office. And we need to
    think about this. There is no big magic national solution for this, but
    I have examined this.
        There are many of you here from New York City. There was a
    profoundly disturbing article on the cover of the New York Times Sunday
    magazine a few months ago about the breakdown of the mental health
    network. It was talking about New York, but it could have been a story
    about any State in America. It just happened to be about New York. And I
    think that this is something we need to give serious attention to and
    something I think we could get strong bipartisan support in Congress to
    work with you on.
        The other day I was talking to Mrs. Gore
    about this. You all know how interested she is. And I had Senator
    Domenici from New Mexico in the White House
    on a totally other, different issue, and I talked to him about it. And I
    said, you know, we've got to do something about this. And he looked at
    me and said, ``You know, a lot of these people are mentally ill, but
    we're not reaching them in time, and people know that they're troubled
    before these things happen.''
        So I ask you to think about this. I think that we have to do more.
    We've got to do everything we can and much more than we have to protect
    our children and to give them back their childhoods. If you think about
    it, we can hardly do more to make America's spirit Y2K ready.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 9:30 a.m. in the State Dining Room at the
    White House. In his remarks, he referred to Rev. Byungchill Hahn,
    pastor, Korean United Methodist Church, Bloomington, IN, whose
    parishioner, Won-Joon Yoon, was murdered near the church on July 4; Rev.
    J. Phillip Wogaman, Rev. Gordon MacDonald, and Rev. Tony Campolo, the
    President's spiritual counselors; Ambassador at Large for International
    Religious Freedom Robert A. Seiple; and Rev. Albert R. Meredith, senior
    pastor, Wedgewood Baptist Church, Fort Worth, TX.