Ensuring Tax Exempt Organizations the Right to Appeal Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, trade agreements are about a set of values and beliefs. Do we believe the American workers and American products can compete with the rest of the world and provide answers and products the world needs? It is an overwhelming yes. When we trade, we not only exchange goods, we exchange ideas and values. Our greatest export is our American value--the dignity of each person, hard work, innovation, and liberty. That is what we send around the world. It has the greatest impact.

What we wrote into our Declaration of Independence is not just an American value statement; we believe it is a statement about every person. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men, not just men and women within the United States but that all people worldwide are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Governments were created to protect the rights given to us by God. We believe every person should have the protection of government to live their faith, not the compulsion of government to practice any one faith or to be forced to reject all faith altogether. That is one of the reasons Americans are disturbed by the trend in our courts, our military, and our public conversation. It is not the task of government to purge religious conversation from public life; it is the task of government to protect the rights of every person to live their faith and to guard those who choose not to have any faith at all.

Thomas Jefferson, in one of the pinnacle works of his life, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, states:

Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness.

With that backdrop, I worked for 2 years with my colleagues to place language into the negotiating language of this trade bill to push our negotiators to consider religious liberty in their negotiations. I have been told over and over again that we don't talk about religious freedom in our trade negotiations. I have just asked, why not? We should encourage trade with another country when that country acknowledges our basic value of the dignity of every person to live their own faith.

Our Nation is not just an economy; our Nation is a set of ideas and values. We believe each person has value and worth. It benefits every person from each nation in the trade agreement if we lead with our values and not sell out for a dollar people who have been in bondage as a prisoner of conscience for years.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recently recommended that the United States should ``ensure that human rights and religious freedom are pursued consistently and publicly at every level of the U.S.-Vietnam relationship, including in the context of discussions relating to military, trade, or economic and security assistance, such as Vietnam's participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as well as in programs that address Internet freedom and civil society development, among others.''

When people have freedom of conscience and faith, they are also better trading partners. Their country is stable, their families are stable, and their economy will grow.

With that, I encourage this body to do something new. Let's start exporting the values we hold dear, not to compel other nations to have our faith but to have other nations recognize the power of the freedom of religion within their own borders.

I have a simple amendment to the trade promotion authority asking the trade negotiators to take into account conditions relating to religious freedom of any party to negotiations for a trade agreement with the United States. It is not complicated. It is a simple encouragement, and it is a step toward us exporting our value.

I ask for the support of this body as we consider our greatest export--freedom.

With that, I yield back.

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