You know I like to take this blog on an occasional road trip to political-ville where I usually stop on opinion hill to have a nice picnic. Well pack the car kids, we're going on a ride.
Normally, I like to represent many sides of a debate, ok
or maybe not. But either way, my blood is boiling about the group opposing the Islamic community center near Ground Zero. They have a ridiculous name created from a string of words that have nothing to do with this effort (American Freedom Defense Initiative) but I refuse to use that name because it is insulting to my intelligence and it doesn't even have a good acronym. Instead, I decided to string together my own sequence of random words to describe them: Righteous American Country Initiative and Salvation from Tyrrany Statesmen. I quite like it. For the sake of brevity I will just call them RACISTS.
I'll start off to say that I already disagree with the argument that putting the center there desecrates the memory of those who died on 9-11. I think most of all that this argument shows a complete and total lack of understanding of who perpetrated the 9-11 attacks. And maybe basic mathematics.
First: the people who masterminded and carried out the attacks do not represent all Muslims. There are literally millions of Muslims in the United States.
American Muslims or Muslims in general are not the same as the 9-11 attackers. Within those millions of American Muslims there may be a handful that sympathize or even join the attackers in ideology, but to let that infinitesimal percentage to represent your entire idea of mosque-going Muslims is preposterous.
It would be like saying all Christians wear too much makeup because of Tammy Faye Baker. Or all dogs are vicious because of Cujo. Or all actors deny the Holocaust and have anger management problems. Are ya with me, people?
Second: The 9-11 attackers hated Americans because of the many freedoms that we have in this country thanks to our Constitution, many of which conflict with their strict way of life. So let's exercise some of those freedoms by, ya know, letting some religion happen!
Then others argue "Look,
I'm not unreasonable but building the mosque will upset some other folks who are unreasonable so it isn't worth the risk." Since when do the reasonable people have to defer to the unreasonable people solely because of their inability to see reason? How about this, we just build it and the unreasonable people have to deal with our reasonableness.
The thing that really set me off today though, was the anti-mosque movement's reaction to a decision on their transit advertising. I'll try and sum up the facts but keep in mind this ain't a news paper and I am working on a staff of one extremely part-time person, an old laptop, and two dogs (neither of whom write very good copy.) The anti-mosque people wanted to run
this ad on New York city buses and subways. The transit authority said no. Then the anti-mosque people sued, saying their first amendment rights have been stomped on. The transit authority reluctantly allows the ads. The anti-mosque people rejoice because the Constitution has prevailed to protect citizen's rights.
So if I was going to whiteboard this out:
First Amendment of the Constitution -> Freedom of Speech -> Government can't regulate my speech with a PFC (pretty freakin' compelling) reason
But also:
First Amendment of the Constitution -> Freedom of Religion -> Government can't regulate my exercise of religion without a PFC (pretty freakin' compelling) reason
So basically the one leg the anti-mosque people have to stand on for their pro-advertisements argument is the exact same leg they have been giving a Tonya Harding to in the anti-mosque argument.
To me that is beyond hypocrisy, it is hypo-CRAZY.
Building your tree house
In the exact tree you chop
For building lumber.
[Ed Note: a shout out to AVR for coming up with the idea of Poetic Jabber-wonky as a combination of Poetic Jabberwocky and the blog Wonkette which publishes edge political commentary.]
