Joe Pitts (Pennsylvania politician)

Joseph Russell Pitts (born October 10, 1939) is a former American politician who served as the U.S. representative for Pennsylvania's 16th congressional district from 1997 to 2017. He is a member of the Republican Party. The district was based in Lancaster and Reading and included much of the Amish country. It also included the far southwestern suburbs of Philadelphia in Chester County.

Quotes

 * Trained combatants in Gujarat entered villages and attacked men, women and children. Pregnant women had their wombs ripped open and unborn babies were ripped out and tossed into burning fires. Approximately three hundred women were gang-raped. Over two thousand people died. I have photos too gruesome to show, in my office . . . Mr Speaker, our government must respond to these brutal attacks and the underlying extremism. The silence of the US Government is deafening.
 * as attributed and quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

Quotes about Joe Pitts

 * In 2004, he went on a fact-finding mission to India, and concluded that the laws preventing abusive conversion methods were undemocratic. He also attended the PIFRAS (Policy Institute for Religion and State) seminar on India that year,  and is known for his pro-Pakistan stand. In 2001 he tried to set up a Kashmir Forum in the US Congress. In 2003 he inaugurated on Capitol Hill a pro-Pakistan conference on Kashmir. He is known to be a ‘long time sympathizer of the pro-Pakistani lobby’ and Indian officials boycotted his events.  As a Christian conservative, he received a hundred percent rating for his voting record from the American Conservative Union in 2005 and the Christian Coalition in 2004. Pitts, along with the former US Senator Rick Santorum, helped sponsor a Religious Freedom Day in 2006 for DFN. Pitts is known for his support for US intervention in Iraq, and also tried to sneak Christian Intelligent Design theory into the national school curriculum.  He is now a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he heads a new program called ‘America’s Enemies’, which will ‘focus on identifying, studying, and heightening awareness of the threats posed to America and the West from a growing array of anti-Western forces that are increasingly casting a shadow over our future and violating religious liberty around the world’.
 * Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines