Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the previous question in order to bring the Protect Women's Health from Corporate Interference Act to the floor. In 1993, I was a leader in passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA. If you had told me then that RFRA would one day be used to allow employers to dictate to employees what preventive health care they can or cannot use, if you had told me then that I would stand on the House floor in 2014 fighting to ensure that women have the ability to make their own most basic health care decisions regardless of their boss' religious beliefs, I would never have believed it. We wrote that bill to be a shield to protect an individual's personal exercise of religious beliefs, not a sword to enable employers to impose their religious beliefs on their employees. No matter how sincerely held a religious belief might be, for-profit employers, like Hobby Lobby or Conestoga Wood, must not be allowed to impose their beliefs or that belief on their employees as a means of denying their employees access to critical preventive health care services. I was proud to work with the gentlewoman from Colorado (Ms. DeGette) and the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Slaughter) to introduce this simple legislation to ensure that, notwithstanding the Supreme Court's mangling of RFRA, employers cannot deny their employees access to federally mandated health services.…”