Washington, D.C. –House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) spoke to the Susan B. Anthony List gala Tuesday evening, touting President Trump’s pro-life accomplishments and concluding with his thoughts on the importance of prayer in light of the recent school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas.
Scalise, who survived being shot in the leg at a congressional baseball game practice last year, talked about the crucial role of faith in his own recovery and said prayer is important for healing society in general.
“I do want to say something about the power of prayer because as we talk about standing up for life, we also believe in a deep faith in God,” he said. “We have our lives from God, God gave us our lives, God is the one who gave us all of our abilities. Now there are people that are trying to push God further and further away from every element of our society.”
He emphasized that he and his family “would not have been able to get through the now nine surgeries without the power of prayer and if you look at what happened that day the only explanation for so many of the things that happened to allow me and everyone else on that field to be alive are miracles, true miracles from God and you can go and point to God’s presence.”
Scalise complained that the media always wants him to focus on the topic of guns when tragic shootings happen, but he thinks society should be more focused on prayer.
“Every time there’s another tragic shooting the media always wants to ask me: well gee whiz does this change your view on guns and they want to make it about guns,” he said, “we just had another horrible, tragic shooting last week in Texas and what I said is you know for decades we’ve had guns but you know what they also had decades ago when you didn’t have school shootings like this? You had God in school, you had prayer in school.”
“There’s no single answer,” Scalise said of these tragic shootings. However, he asked, “what harm could there be in maybe bringing some of those elements of the values of prayer and God back in our schools and other elements of society where it’s been pushed out over the decades and then we wonder why the culture of our youth has changed where a kid would do some of the things that they’re doing today that they never would’ve done decades ago.”
In addition to emphasizing the importance of prayer, Scalise praised President Trump’s pro-life accomplishments including his recent proposal to take away Title X family planning funding from abortion providers.
“You’ve got a president who backs up everything he said with real action,” he told those gathered. “He follows through on his promises and he has carried through what can arguably be the most pro-life agenda of any president.”
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