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Congressional Daily Record
This section covers nominations, confirmations, or other executive branch business. It mentions members such as John R. Curtis.
Official title: Religious Freedoms (Executive Calendar)
Issued
June 24, 2026
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Download official Senate Record PDFReturn to issue contextMr. CURTIS. Mr. President, almost 250 years ago, 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress affixed their signature to the most influential document in the history of human rights: the American Declaration of Independence.
their own declaration of independence with statements that followed the American pattern of 1776. It proclaimed liberty as an unalienable right in what Walter Isaacson has called “the greatest sentence ever written.”
Among our unalienable rights, the document declared, are “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Defining liberty and giving definition, substance, and legal guarantees of that right has been one of America's greatest ongoing commitments to the betterment of humanity. And at the forefront of that pantheon of liberties the Declaration affirms has been the right to believe and practice religion according to the dictates of our own conscience.
modeled, in whole or in part, on the American model. Freedom of religion is guaranteed in principle, if not in fact, in 97 percent of those constitutions.
existed in theory, like that of John Locke, but not in political practice. Roger Williams founded Rhode Island on the principle of sole conscience in 1636, and 150 years later, in 1786, Thomas Jefferson authored the pioneering Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:
Almighty God hath created the mind free and manifested his
Supreme will that free it shall remain.
shall “suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all [persons] shall be free to profess . . . their opinions in matters of religion.”
Quakers were hanged in Massachusetts in 1659. Baptists were imprisoned in Virginia in the 1770s. Catholic convents and schools were burned in 1834. My own people, the Latter Day Saints, were mobbed and murdered in Missouri and Illinois in the decade to follow. And Jewish people have been the victims of discrimination and violence from the founding to the present.
legislate religious protections but you cannot legislate respect or compassion or bonds of charity. Yet religious freedom hinges on these virtues.
what Arthur Brooks has called a “culture of contempt.” If you think you sense something alarming in the air, the statistics say you are right. A March 2026 Pew survey reveals the distressing fact that Americans view their fellow Americans with more hostility and suspicion than is the case in any democracy surveyed.
describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad, 53 percent, than as good, 47 percent. We can do better. We have to do better.
espouse our values—religious, moral, or political—without hindrance or constraint. That also means we must accord to others the right to espouse their values without hindrance or constraint.
the free exercise of religion presupposes a mosaic of differing values and other life orientations.
The words “kindness,” “civility,” and “charity” nowhere appear in our Constitution or our Declaration of Independence, whose anniversary we will commemorate next week. That is because those values were presupposed by the Founders.
requires for its continuation a willingness to build bridges of understanding, as well as defend principles to which we are committed.
Dr. Matthew Holland has written of how civic charity is deeply embedded in our thoughts; John Winthrop, leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, of Thomas Jefferson, America's apostle of religious liberty, and of Abraham Lincoln, who so powerfully invoked the better angels of our nature at a time of national crisis.
commitments or our lack of religious commitments, nor should we. Our pluralism is a source of our strength and should be a source of pride.
particular kind of faith they did have in common: faith in the essential goodness of each other and one another.
The psychologist Jamil Zaki has written: Cynicism is a lack of faith in people. Skepticism is a lack of faith in our assumptions. Charity is the only way whereby we flourish in our differences, even as we work together for a more perfect Union.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.