Progressives

The issue is not freedom of religion. That goes without saying, although I am glad it is being said.  I am ready to fight for the right of American Muslims to worship what, how and when they please.  They can pray where ever they find themselves.  That includes ground zero.  Like the old saying goes, however, “your right to swing your fist stops at the end of my nose”.  As applied here, that means your right to practice your religion stops when it disrupts my life, causes me pain, threatens my privacy, or puts me at risk of property loss, injury or death, etc.

I vehemently oppose the Cordoba House project as proposed. This is not because I think Muslims should be singled out to restrict the practice of their religion any more than I would advocate restricting the worship of Baptists, Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Krishnas, Buddhists, Christian Scientists, or any other religion.  I oppose the Cordoba House at the proposed location because of the obvious disruptive intent of its developers.  I am totally ignoring the politicians on both sides of the debate.  They don’t count because there is no way to know what they really think.  They have long records of taking positions on issues that are popular with their constituencies.

It is obvious to me and apparently to millions of other Americans that those who insist this “place of worship” be placed on that particular site, do so because of the slap-in-the-face their success would be to all Americans (not just those who lost loved ones on 9/11/2001.  We all lost something we could not afford to lose that day)  The priority here is clearly the slap-in-the-face, NOT worship.

I see this as being akin to the practice of the native tribes of the North American plains of “counting coup”.  In this practice the plains warriors would gain much prestige at the expense of their enemy when they would touch an enemy warrior with a hand or a coup stick and escape unharmed, (kind of a slap-in-the-face)  It did no real physical damage but inflicted great psychological distress on the enemy.  It was a way of saying “I can have you anytime I want, and what are you going to do about it?”, or in the vernacular “up yours buddy”.

Adding to this proposed insult, the federal government is currently funding the efforts of the promoters to raise the $100,000,000 it will take to build on that site.  What happened to the separation of church and state?  Perhaps that applies only to “churches”, not mosques.  Somehow, I would not be surprised to discover that a few dozen millions of our tax dollars end up in the project.

There are literally thousands of potential sites for the Cordoba House project that would be more cost effective, more convenient to sincere worshipers and would cause no disruption, insult or emotional pain to America and Americans in general.  Of course, these sites will not do, for the reasons listed above.  The radical islamists could not count coup. They would not be slapping our collective faces daily for the next hundred years or so.  Somehow the thought of that makes me smile.

Let the radical islamists (with whom our president seems to be included) be disappointed this time.  I think we Americans should support this project by donating an alternative site for the project… perhaps in the Meadowlands of New Jersey.

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