Richard K. Armey: “I want to first compliment my friend, the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Istook). The gentleman has spent so many long…”

“I want to first compliment my friend, the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Istook). The gentleman has spent so many long hours, so many days working on this, and working with so many people, constitutional scholars and others. I want to also thank the committee for their hard work. This is a good piece of legislation. For 150 years we in this Nation understood and we practiced a restraint of government against the pattern that we had seen, our Founding Fathers had seen and found aberrant in so many other cases where governments imposed religion on people. Our Founding Fathers understood that the role of the government in this right, as in all other human rights, was to recognize and honor and appreciate that these rights are given to man by God Almighty, and that it is the role of the State to protect those rights. But beginning in the fifties and then in the sixties, we saw what anybody that had any common sense understanding of personal liberty and religious conviction would understand to be bizarre decisions made in the courts, and sometimes, in fact, in regulations by the Federal Government.”