Kaine speaks on Senate floor commemorating National Religious Freedom Day

Virginia Senator Tim Kaine spoke on the Senate floor commemorating National Religious Freedom Day amid a sharp rise in antisemitism, Islamophobia, and threats to other faith-based communities.

In October, the FBI reported that antisemitic hate crimes rose 25 percent from 2021 to 2022 and that it accounted for over half of all reported religion-based hate crimes.

Kaine says part of the solution to stopping hate crimes is to go back to first principles.

"We have to guard, protect and celebrate, not merely tolerate, a society with people of different religious faiths can live in the same neighborhoods, attend the same schools, work side by side and do so as friends," he said.

The day honors the Virginia General Assembly's passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786.

It was drafted by Thomas Jefferson and became the basis of the First Amendment's protection of religious freedom.