I'm not surprised that there are people who don't want a new mosque in lower Manhattan. I'm sure there are people who would be saddened to see a new mosque built anywhere in America. I guess I'm not really surprised that that includes prominent political figures. It's the utter lack of shame that surprises me.
There are any number of hypothetical situations where you might ask people, in the name of sensitivity, to refrain from doing something they have every right to do. But I believe that a decent person will never feel too comfortable making that request.
It's astonishing to see the opposition, including two of the presumptive front-runners for the GOP's 2012 presidential nomination, stumbling over themselves and even inventing words in their rush to condemn the project. As Newt Gingrich himself said:
There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over. (From Newt Gingrich's website.)Palin and Gingrich had already chosen their sides. Would Romney be the one to break from the pack? Pawlently? This would be a great chance for a younger Republican, like Jindal or Ryan or Cantor to dial back the crazy and look like statesman material.
Today Mayor Michael Bloomberg delivered a memorable, articulate, historically-mindful speech on the controversy. I don't think that it's a coincidence that he's wealthy enough to finance his own campaigns and that he's frequently denied any ambition for higher office. My favorite passage from his speech:
Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.Comparing that part of the mayor's speech to Gingrich's press release sums up the two sides for me. One man says, "As long as they permit intolerance over there, we'll refuse to show tolerance to them here." The other man says, "They may do that over there, but we won't do that here." One of those men is mounting a campaign to gain his party's nomination for the presidency.
(The full text of the mayor's speech is available here.)
