Steve Daines Quotes

Nowhere have the forces of intolerance been displayed less tolerantly than in the area of religious speech and practice.

Any open society that tolerates intolerance, sees tolerance disappear and the tolerant along with it.

There is much depressing evidence that the religious voice is required to stay out of the public square only when it is pressed in a conservative cause.

One would suppose that the battle for religious liberty was won in the United States two hundred years ago. However, in the time since, and right now, powerful voices are always raised in favor of bigotry and thought control. It is useful, then, to have a compendium of the thoughts of great men and women of all faiths (and of none) on the subject, to convince us that we men and woman of freedom are not and never have been alone.

We must not enable anyone to impose his personal view regarding religion on others by force, oppression, or pressure.

You can talk about and think about Muslims as you want, but you can't stop Muslims from building a mosque. You can hate Muslims from the comfort of your house or publicly, but when that becomes stopping Muslims from building a mosque or worshipping, then we are crossing the line into something else.

I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance, or admit a right in inquiry into the religious opinions of others.

So natural to mankind is intolerance ... that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized.

Democratic elements in a society by their very nature feel that they have to give their religious fundamentalist opposition freedom of expression and action, a handicap from which their fundamentalist opponents do not suffer.

I certainly would absolutely never do what some of my American colleagues do and object to religious symbols being used, putting crosses up in the public square and things like that. I don't fret about that at all; I'm quite happy about that.

It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.

[The founding fathers] believed that freedom of expression included religious views and beliefs, so long as the government did not force people to worship in a particular matter and remain neutral on what those views and beliefs were.

Religious freedom in an open society has the best prospects of flourishing to the extent that it expresses itself as freedom of religious inquiry.

The Founders intended only to prevent the establishment of a single national denomination, not to restrain public religious expressions.

We do not credit to the ideal of religious freedom when we talk as though religious belief is something of which public-spirited adults should be ashamed.

I would like to see the lack of demonization for those of us who stand on sincerely held religious beliefs. It's overdue. That's where you see the demonization of people who stand on their beliefs.

Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression.

The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realised, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale.

Where religion is trivialized, one is unlikely to find persecution.

I am committed to the First Amendment principles of religious freedom, tolerance, and diversity. Whether Mormon, Methodist, Jewish, or Muslim, Americans should be able to participate in their constitutional free exercise of religion. I do not think witchcraft is a religion, and I do not think it is in any way appropriate for the U.S. military to promote it.

Nothing is more logical than persecution. Religious tolerance is a kind of infidelity.

The zealous disdain for religion in American jurisprudence amounts to intolerance. Keith Fournier of the American Center for Law and Justice concludes that 'the ones not being tolerated are religious people who dare make any kind of religious reference or take any kind of religious posture outside the private arena.

In the experiences of a year of the Presidency, there has come to me no other such unwelcome impression as the manifest religious intolerance which exists among many of our citizens. I hold it to be a menace to the very liberties we boast and cherish.

Every religion has its dignity ... in freedom of expression there are limits.

Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.