Increasingly, I’m finding myself troubled by the “ground zero mosque” controversy.
Instinctively, like a lot of people, like 70% of Americans, in fact, I don’t like the idea of building a high-profile mosque near ground zero.
It just feels wrong to me, like a ham-handed statement of tolerance and inclusion, rather than an actual example of tolerance and inclusion.
That being said, it’s obvious that any group has a categorical right to build a place of worship wherever they damn well please. That’s religious freedom. That, in fact, is what America, in all its weird and crazy and inspirational glory, is predicated upon. It’s a first principle– sacrosanct and beyond debate.
Still, there is opposition. Bleeding rage, political opportunists, bigots and various lunatics have been swinging from branch to branch howling like a bunch of monkeys. These responses have been brutish and visceral, bringing shame and embarrassment to the majority who’ve assumed a more ambivalent posture. Personally, if I was faced with such a fervid and blind intensity of opposition, it would infuriate me, and I would redouble all my efforts to assert my constitutionally enshrined rights. I would not let “them” win.
I get that.
But it seems clear to me, really strikingly obvious, that it’s just too soon, and perhaps far too hopeful, to try to impose this gesture of tolerance and acceptance, on a nation that still doesn’t even know how to address the wounds it incurred on September 11th.
I mean, the stated mandate of the Cordoba Initiative (the project behind the complex that will house the mosque) is to improve relations between the Muslim world and the United States, but they seek to initiate this process by doing something that a huge majority of Americans oppose and would obviously resent. This seems either wholly disingenuous, or a tragic misreading of a nation.
Regardless of how wrong-headed you might think the protests against this mosque might be, you simply have to respect the sincerity of those opposing it. Maybe it’s just not the right time to try to drag these people into an imagined future, and perhaps it would be best for those within the Muslim community to step forward and acknowledge that perhaps this is not the time and place for a mosque, and out of respect and love for the community that they are a part of, scale back the project.
Of course, this wouldn’t satisfy the radicals, but it would satisfy the majority of people, and that would go a long way to start the process of improving relations between the Muslim world and the United States, as the Cordoba Initiative claims as it’s goal.