Dan Coats: “I thank the Senator from Missouri. I thank him also for his willingness to engage with this amendment, to put it in play…”

“I thank the Senator from Missouri. I thank him also for his willingness to engage with this amendment, to put it in play here for us to debate and discuss. It is a very fundamental principle of our Constitution that is at stake, and it deserves debate, and it deserves this body putting their yea or nay on the line relative to how we are going to go forward. I commend him for his leadership, and I am pleased to join him, as well as many others, in this colloquy. This is an issue that is as old as this Nation. We are all blessed to live in this Nation and are blessed by the wisdom of our Founding Fathers, guaranteeing our rights. The very first right they guaranteed in the Constitution was the right to religious freedom. Many of the earliest settlers came here because of that right and their desire to come to a country where their religious beliefs, tenets, and principles would be respected and honored, where they would not be dictated to by a government like they lived under before they came here, but it would be protected and preserved as a basic fundamental right. It was a transformational idea at the time. Yet, now for well more than 220 years or so, it has been maintained throughout the history of this country. It stands as a bulwark against government interference with personal beliefs and government trying to dictate how we exercise the religious freedoms we are all so privileged to have.…”