The Ground Zero Mosque

The past several weeks, I’ve found myself perturbed, confused, and saddened by repeated high-minded objections to the construction of an Islamic cultural center in downtown New York, 2 or 3 blocks from the site of the World Trade Center bombings.

Since the cultural center, which also includes a swimming pool, meeting rooms, and exhibits devoted to ecumenicism across religions, is funded by an Islamic religious organization and contains a prayer room, it has been labeled in short hand as a mosque.

What is obvious about any and all objections to this center is that, whatever intellectual construct is used, at the base is a visceral belief that Muslims should not have the same rights to religious freedoms as other Americans.

The Jewish community in particular is having a hard time walking the fine line between their natural distaste for all things Muslim, and the insights gained from their own history of persecution on religious and ethnic grounds. Some say that the organizing imam should be allowed to build his mosque; he just needs to be sensitive to the unique nature of the neighborhood and the feelings of those who hold that area “sacred”.

As the young are saying now, “Excuse me?”

That sounds EXACTLY like the argument Muslims and Arabs make against the state of Israel. “Why do you have to have your home land in OUR neighborhood?”

Then, there is that leading thinker of the Republican party, Newt Gingrich (no irony intended; the man is intelligent, thoughtful, though devious.) He claims the mosque should not be allowed at Ground Zero until Saudi Arabia allows Christian missionaries and churches on its soil (sand?)

We should give up OUR religious freedoms because some other countries are not as enlightened as we were at our founding? This makes no sense as a guiding principle for national morals.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer tried a legalistic approach: “America is a free country where you can build whatever you want – but not anywhere. That’s why we have zoning laws. No liquor store near a school, no strip malls where they offend local sensibilities, and, if your house doesn’t meet community architectural codes, you cannot build at all.”

Except: the local zoning authority, the mayor of the city, and all other appropriate legal bodies have signed off on this center.

I won’t even begin to note all of the non-thinking objections to this center from the like of Sarah Palin, Fox News, Beck & Limbaugh, etc. Their attempts to appeal to the prejudice and hatred of their audience is obvious.

This is an incendiary and devious issue to be raised from a political perspective; and, in the end, that’s what this is really all about: another opportunity for Republicans to corner Democrats and gain more votes.

Republican strategists don’t care a whit about actually attempting to live by one of the principles they espouse: “The Constitution is our founding document, and must take precedence. We have to ensure our government follows those principles, and that its leaders do not subvert those principles to follow their own ideological agenda.”

70% of Americans polled object to “a mosque built at Ground Zero.” So, Democrats support this center at their peril, even if, legally and morally, such support is correct. That’s why President Obama’s support of the cultural center, on Friday night speaking to Muslims in the White House at an annual gathering similar to a “prayer breakfast”, which all recent Presidents have done, was so striking.

As a former constitutional law professor, Obama must have felt an immense pull to lecture the country on just what the right thing to do here is. Against that urge was arrayed all of the psychotic fears Obama haters have – he’s a secret Muslim, he’s trying to run out country down, he doesn’t believe in basic American principles. Well, he’s already lost all of those people; he can’t really make things worse for himself by reminding the more thoughtful among us about what the true meaning of America’s founding represents.

Without coming out and saying it, he is asking the question, “Are we a country which is  to be governed by law and reason, rather than ruled by emotion and hatred and fear?”

If our Constitution means anything, if the very core of our nation’s founding, the freedom to practice one’s religion, is to have any meaning and force, than this building, offensive as it may seem to some, should be allowed to proceed.

All of the feelings people have about the propriety of an Islamic center two blocks from the site of the Twin Towers bombings are real, and not to be disparaged. Likewise, the feelings many of us have about the meaning and requirements of religious freedom for all, not just Christians, should not be dismissed as un-American. America is great not because it hates and excludes; we are great because we are many and varied.

While it saddens me that the American President feels the need to explain this, I am once again heartened that, at his core, he is a thoughtful and inclusive American.