Ernest Istook: “But there is no perfect symbol. There will always be, to any symbol, some people who object, saying I do not like that.…”

“But there is no perfect symbol. There will always be, to any symbol, some people who object, saying I do not like that. In the case of Edmond, Oklahoma, I thought it was an outrageous comment, but they had a person saying, well, every time I see the city seal on a police car or something, it makes me feel like a second-class citizen. So what the courts did was they elevated this subjective approach, the fact that somebody felt bad maybe because they were thin-skinned or sensitive or maybe they had had some unfortunate incidents in their life, but because somebody felt bad, it trumped the constitutional rights of free speech and free expression and freedom of religion of everybody else. That is the problem with the court decisions. They say unless it is unanimous, unless everybody agrees on some religious expression, you cannot have it, and maybe not even then. Well, you do not expect that of anything else. Why use the first amendment as a weapon against religion, which is what the courts are doing, saying that you do not have freedom of expression of religion, that it is supposedly creating a freedom from hearing about religion on behalf of people that do not want to hear it.”