Washington, D.C. - Mr. Chairman, I thank my colleague for yielding me time.
Mr. Chairman, let me start by talking about what this amendment is not about. It is not about whether faith-based organizations can provide valuable services. They can and they do. In fact, many are currently running Head Start programs. The issue is whether those Head Start programs, faith-based programs that are receiving taxpayers dollars can discriminate in hiring based on religion; whether someone who comes to them with a terrific background in early childhood education can have the door shut on them because they do not pass a particular religious test, because they are not Jewish or not Christian or not Muslim or whatever the particular test is.
Now, I have talked to many people around this country involved in the Head Start program, and not one of them has said to me, gee, we could do a much better job teaching children how to read, we could do a much better job teaching children arithmetic if only we could discriminate, if only we could fire the Jews in our organization, if only we could fire the Christians, if only we could fire the Baptists. No one has said that we need to do that, and it is a sad day that that comes up on this bill.
Nothing should be more universal. Nothing is more universal in this country than the desire of everyone to provide their children with a good start in life, a head start in life. And yet what this provision of the bill does that we are stripping out is sends a terrible message to the children of this country that it is okay to discriminate based on religion.
When we are teaching children in their earliest years the values that we want them to learn, we do not want to teach them the lesson of religious intolerance and religious bigotry. We must support the Woolsey amendment. I urge my colleagues to do so.