Jeff Van Drew Quotes

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?

Americans deserve to have their religious beliefs and practices protected. Religious freedom is too important to be trampled by insensitive bureaucracy or bad policy.

Our right to practice our faith freely is respected up to the point where doing so involves harming others.

The liberty enjoyed by the people of these states of worshiping Almighty God agreebly to their conscience, is not only among the choicest of their blessings, but also of their rights.

What other nations call religious toleration, we call religious rights. They are not exercised in virtue of governmental indulgence, but as rights, of which government cannot deprive any portion of citizens, however small.

The First Amendment freedom of religion is as important today as when the Bill of Rights was first written.

Resist this war on God, freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren.

Religious freedom is already protected in the United States. It's in our Constitution. It's in most state constitutions.

Religious freedom, often referred to as the first freedom, is of central import to the American experiment. As such it should feature prominently in U.S. foreign policy.

That every man’s speak freely without fear, maintain the principles that he believes, worship according to his own faith, either one God, three Gods, no God, or 20 Gods; and let government protect him in doing so.

Freedom of the press and of religious opinion should be inviolate.

Freedom of religion, as the Founding Fathers saw it, was not just the right to associate oneself with a certain denomination but the right to disassociate without penalty.

The Catholics had the right secured to them by the Constitution of worshipping the God of their fathers in the manner dictated by their consciences.... This country is not prepared to establish an inquisition to try and punish men for their religious beliefs.

Enforced uniformity confounds civil and religious liberty and denies the principles of Christianity and civility. No man shall be required to worship or maintain a worship against his will.

Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.

The federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act passed unanimously in the House, won 97 votes in the Senate, and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. Twenty states have passed their own versions of this law, and 11 additional ones have religious-liberty protections that state courts have interpreted to provide a similar level of protection.

In our Constitution, our bedrock principle, you know - indeed, what the nation was founded on - is an idea of freedom of religion: that we don't single out people because of their religion.

Nothing is more important to me, and nothing was more important to our founding fathers, than freedom of religion.

Our First Amendment should preserve the right of Hindus and Muslims to practice their faith.

There is no such thing as 'separation of church and state.' Reporters continue to promote this fallacy and scare Christians out of standing up for their beliefs.

I just see religious freedom, as a category, as just being a black hole.

The right to religious freedom is not a gift of the state or a gift of a group.

There are lots of different ideas, lots of different opinions about the First Amendment Defense Act and what it should be. There were a lot of different forms of it while I was on the Hill. But I would say that I agree that the decision on gay marriage does mean that we need to take some steps to defend religious liberty.

Our freedoms are shared freedoms: they are bound up in each other. The ability to confront oppression in the guise of religion is linked to our ability to worship as we choose: both are acts of expression.