Conference lgp30::christian-perspective

760.0. "Religious Freedom Restoration Act" by LGP30::FLEISCHER (without vision the people perish (DTN 223-8576, MSO2-2/A2, IM&T)) Wed Nov 17 1993 12:41

        Anyone here know what the "Religious Freedom Restoration Act"
        is all about?

        Bob
+++++++++++++++++++

                           THE WHITE HOUSE

                    Office of the Press Secretary
___________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                          November 16, 1993     

	     
                       REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
    AT SIGNING CEREMONY FOR THE RELIGIOUS FREEDOM RESTORATION ACT
	     
	     
                          The South Grounds 



9:15 A.M. EST


	     THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President, 
for those fine remarks, and to the members of Congress, the chaplains 
of the House and the Senate, and to all of you who worked so hard to 
help this day become a reality.  Let me especially thank the 
Coalition for the Free Exercise of Religion for the central role they 
played in drafting this legislation and working so hard for its 
passage.
	     
	     It is interesting to note, as the Vice President said, 
what a broad coalition of Americans came together to make this bill a 
reality.  It's interesting to note that that coalition produced a 97-
to-3 vote in the United States Senate, and a bill that had such broad 
support it was adopted on a voice vote in the House.
	     
	     I'm told that, as many of the people in the coalition 
worked together across ideological and religious lines, some new 
friendships were formed and some new trust was established, which 
shows, I suppose, that the power of God is such that even in the 
legislative process miracles can happen.  (Laughter.)
	     
	     We all have a shared desire here to protect perhaps the 
most precious of all American liberties, religious freedom.  Usually 
the signing of legislation by a president is a ministerial act, often 
a quiet ending to a turbulent legislative process.  Today, this event 
assumes a more majestic quality because of our ability together to 
affirm the historic role that people of faith have played in the 
history of this country and the constitutional protections those who 
profess and express their faith have always demanded and cherished.
	     
	     The power to reverse legislation by legislation, a 
decision of the United States Supreme Court, is a power that is 
rightly hesitantly and infrequently exercised by the United States 
Congress.  But this is an issue in which that extraordinary measure 
was clearly called for.
	     
	     As the Vice President said, this act reverses the 
Supreme Court's decision, Employment Division against Smith, and 
reestablishes a standards that better protects all Americans of all 
faiths in the exercise of their religion in a way that I am convinced 
is far more consistent with the intent of the founders of this nation 
than the Supreme Court decision.
	     
	     More than 50 cases have been decided against individuals 
making religious claims against government action since that decision 
was handed down.  This act will help to reverse that trend -- by 
honoring the principle that our laws and institutions should not 
impede or hinder, but rather should protect and preserve fundamental 
religious liberties.
	     
	     The free exercise of religion has been called the first 
freedom -- that which originally sparked the development of the full 
range of the Bill of Rights.  Our founders cared a lot about 
religion.  And one of the reasons they worked so hard to get the 
First Amendment into the Bill of Rights at the head of the class is 
that they well understood what could happen to this country, how both 
religion and government could be perverted if there were not some 
space created and some protection provided.  They knew that religion 
helps to give our people the character without which a democracy 
cannot survive.  They knew that there needed to be a space of freedom 
between government and people of faith that otherwise government 
might usurp.  
	     
	     They have seen now, all of us, that religion and 
religious institutions have brought forth faith and discipline, 
community and responsibility over two centuries for ourselves and 
enabled us to live together in ways that I believe would not have 
been possible.  We are, after all, the oldest democracy now in 
history, and probably the most truly multiethnic society on the face 
of the Earth.  And I am convinced that neither one of those things 
would be true today had it not been for the importance of the First 
Amendment and the fact that we have kept faith with it for 200 years.  
(Applause.) 
	     
	     What this law basically says is that the government 
should be held to a very high level of proof before it interferes 
with someone's free exercise of religion.  This judgment is shared by 
the people of the United States as well as by the Congress.  We 
believe strongly that we can never -- we can never be too vigilant in 
this work.  
	     
	     Let me make one other comment if I might before I close 
and sit down and sign this bill.  There is a great debate now abroad 
in the land which finds itself injected into several political races 
about the extent to which people of faith can seek to do God's will 
as political actors.  I would like to come down on the side of 
encouraging everybody to act on what they believe is the right thing 
to do.  There are many people in this country who strenuously 
disagree with me on what they believe are the strongest grounds of 
their faiths.  I encourage them to speak out.  I encourage all 
Americans to reach deep inside to try to determine what it is that 
drives their lives most deeply.
	     
	     As many of you know, I have been quite moved by Steven 
Carter's book, The Culture of Disbelief.  He makes a compelling case 
that today Americans of all political persuasions and all regions 
have created a climate in this country in which some people believe 
that they are embarrassed to say that they advocate a course of 
action simply because they believe it is the right thing; because 
they believe it is dictated by their faith, by what they discern to 
be, with their best efforts, the will of God.
	     
	     I submit to you today, my fellow Americans, that we can 
stand that kind of debate in this country.  We are living in a 
country where the most central institution of our society, the 
family, has been under assault for 30 years.  We are living in a 
country in which 160,000 school children don't go to school every day 
because they're afraid someone will shoot them, or beat them up, or 
knife them.  We are living in a country now where gun shots are the 
single leading cause of death among teenage boys.  We are living in a 
country where people can find themselves shot in the cross fire of 
teenagers who are often better armed than the police who are trying 
to protect other people from illegal conduct.
	     
	     It is high time we had an open and honest reaffirmation 
of the role of American citizens of faith -- not so that we can 
agree, but so that we can argue and discourse and seek the truth and 
seek to heal this troubled land.
	     
	     So today I ask you to also think of that.  We are a 
people of faith.  We have been so secure in that faith that we have 
enshrined in our Constitution protection for people who profess no 
faith.  And good for us for doing so.  That is what the First 
Amendment is all about.  But let us never believe that the freedom of 
religion imposes on any of us some responsibility to run from our 
convictions.  Let us instead respect one another's faiths, fight to 
the death to preserve the right of every American to practice 
whatever convictions he or she has, but bring our values back to the 
table of American discourse to heal our troubled land.
	     
	     Thank you very much.  (Applause.)
	     
	     (The bill is signed.)  (Applause.)

                                 END9:25 A.M. EST


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re: Note 760.0 by Bob "without vision the people perish 

>        Anyone here know what the "Religious Freedom Restoration Act"
>        is all about?

This sounds to me like it might be related to the issue of some Native 
Americans who were civil servants and were fired from their jobs based on 
their religious use of peyote.  (In Oregon or Washington perhaps?)

That is from memory and might be totally wrong.

Jim

I was reading an article in the Nashua Telegraph about this this morning.
From memory: the new law, which passed overwhelmingly in Congress, is
designed to reverse a Supreme Court decision that held that the government
could pass laws that restricted religious practices (such as the use of
peyote as part of a religious service) as long as the law served a
primarily secular purpose and was not passed with the purpose of
restricting the free exercise of religion.  Previous court decisions,
which the new law reaffirms, had put the burden of proof on the government
to show that a law restricting religious practices did so to the least extent
possible that was consistent with the secular purpose.

				-- Bob