Yesterday I learned that the U.S. Senate race in Missouri between Republican Roy Blunt and Democrat Robin Carnahan is now being waged over — wait for it — the so-called “ground zero mosque.”

Missouri’s candidates for U.S. Senate clashed Thursday over a proposed Islamic community center near ground zero in New York City, an issue that has dominated the national political debate in recent days.

Republican Roy Blunt said the center — which includes a mosque — should be nowhere near the “battleground” where Islamic terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Democrat Robin Carnahan countered that New Yorkers should decide among themselves on what is essentially a local zoning matter.

Those of you moved to make a donation to the Carnahan campaign may do so through her website.

Meanwhile, I’m reading that construction workers and suppliers from all over the country are vowing not to build the Islamic Center.

The grass-roots movement is gaining momentum on the Internet. One construction worker created the “Hard Hat Pledge” on his blog and asked others to vow not to work on the project if it stays on Park Place.

“Thousands of people are signing up from all over the country,” said creator Andy Sullivan, a construction worker from Brooklyn. “People who sell glass, steel, lumber, insurance. They are all refusing to do work if they build there.”

“Hopefully, this will be a tool to get them to move it,” he said. “I got a problem with this ostentatious building looming over Ground Zero.”

If Mr. Sullivan lives in Brooklyn, I assume he’s been to lower Manhattan once or twice in his life, meaning he should know the Islamic Center will not be “looming over Ground Zero.” For all the visual impact it’s going to have on Ground Zero it might as well be built in Missouri.

And let me also point out that since there are no architectural drawings yet, we have no way to know how “ostentatious” the center will be. All we know is that the building will be modeled conceptually on the 92nd Street Y, a familiar New York institution that began as a YMHA — Young Men’s Hebrew Association. And I wouldn’t call the 92nd Street Y building “ostentatious.” One suspects Mr. Sullivan believes the “ground zero mosque” will be not only be built at “ground zero,” but will literally be a mosque.

Truly, Ignorance got up early and tar-papered the whole neighborhood while Truth was still asleep.

The article quotes one construction worker saying he’s on the fence on the issue, but it’s not hard to imagine that construction workers who really don’t mind the Islamic Center would have to be very courageous to say so, and possibly would have to find a new career.

Meanwhile meanwhile — Charles Krauthammer sinks further and further into duplicitous arguments about rights. But first, let’s review what CK said in his previous column:

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.

He’s arguing that government should stop the building of the center, is he not? But today he says, ‘No one disputes the right to build; the whole debate is about the propriety, the decency of doing so.”

“Rights” are not symbolic abstractions. A right that cannot be exercised is not a right. Krauthammer and others on the Right keep saying they don’t dispute the right to build the Islamic Center on private property, but are saying the Center shouldn’t be built. And, the conservatives say, we have a right to express our opinion. Yes, they do, just as I have a right to call them bigots and ignoramuses.

But if the Right somehow stops the Islamic Center from being built, whether by government, or by a privately organized campaign to deny the builders the ability to build, or by any other means, then they’re saying Rauf et al. don’t have a right to build an Islamic Center on private property. A right that cannot be exercised is not a right.

An analogy — this is like saying yes, you have a right to express your opinion, and we have a right to stick a gag in your mouth to shut you up if we disagree.

Now, on to the claim just because we think all Muslims are the same doesn’t make us bigots. You either understand that Muslims are not all associated with jihadists, or you don’t. Krauthammer writes,

Radical Islam is not, by any means, a majority of Islam. But with its financiers, clerics, propagandists, trainers, leaders, operatives and sympathizers — according to a conservative estimate, it commands the allegiance of 7 percent of Muslims, i.e., more than 80 million souls — it is a very powerful strain within Islam. It has changed the course of nations and affected the lives of millions. It is the reason every airport in the West is an armed camp and every land is on constant alert.

Ground Zero is the site of the most lethal attack of that worldwide movement, which consists entirely of Muslims, acts in the name of Islam and is deeply embedded within the Islamic world. These are regrettable facts, but facts they are. And that is why putting up a monument to Islam in this place is not just insensitive but provocative.

So, because a whole bleeping 7 percent of Muslims are jihadists, the other 93 percent of Muslims are guilty, too?

Greg Sargent:

Here’s the thing: If you believe that it is “provocative” to put a center devoted to the study of all of Islam near the site of the attacks, then you are inescapably legitimizing the idea that all of Islam is somehow responsible for, or should be vaguely associated with, those attacks. If you don’t believe that — if you believe that the attacks were carried out by a group that perverted Islam and wasn’t genuinely acting on its behalf — then you wouldn’t have any reason to see the building of a project nearby devoted to studying Islam as “provocative.”

Claiming that the attacks were carried out “in the name” of Islam is a transparent way to dodge that simple truth. It’s a way for Krauthammer to make an argument premised inescapably on the idea that all of Islam should be somehow conflated with the attacks while claiming he isn’t doing that at all.

It’s generally the case that bigots can’t see their own bigotry. The minute you recognize your bigotry as bigotry, you begin the process of letting go of bigotry. Die-hard bigots, on the other hand, believe their opinions are simple facts and think people who disagree with them are nuts or naive. So the bigots will continue to deny they are bigots and take offense at being called bigots — but they’re still bigots.

See also: Mosque debate: New Yorkers take dim view of rabble-rousing outsiders

Someone asked Oz Sultan, spokesperson for the Cordoba House project, whether his group would accept funds from overseas, in particular the Middle East. Sultan said, in effect that the group was still working out its fundraising strategies, and no decisions had been made. This led to ABC news issuing a report that ties hypothetical Saudi donations to the September 11 attack. The report’s strong implication is that most of the 9/11 perps were Saudis; therefore, all money from Saudi Arabia is connected to 9/11.

This was not the New York Post, mind you, but ABC News. Although I believe the New York Post reported the story the same way.

Of course, the evil Iran also is in the Middle East. I saw a news story this morning — it seems to have been taken down already — that ran a photo of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf next to one of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad under a headline saying that money from Iran could be used to build the Islamic center. If you didn’t read the story itself very, very carefully, you’d believe it said that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was funding the “ground zero mosque.” But what Sultan said was that although the group would prefer to raise the money from domestic donations, they hadn’t yet ruled out accepting donations from people in the Middle East. Not everyone in the Middle East is a terrorist or a dictator, you know.

As Politico points out, so far all the planners have are intentions. They haven’t raised the money for the project yet. They haven’t acquired all the property they plan to use, just some of it. They haven’t even hired an architect. In fact, the Politico article says, they haven’t even hired a lobbyist. How can you possibly get anything done without a lobbyist?

Meanwhile, the percentage of the American public who thinks the president is a Muslim is growing. See also “In Defining Obama, Misperceptions Stick.”

Also meanwhile, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Americans don’t understand the concept of “rights.” That’s rather sad, considering that our nation allegedly was founded on the principle of human rights, or the Rights of Man, as Thomas Paine called them. It appears, however, that large numbers of Americans think of “rights” as somewhat abstract privileges granted by the consent of society.

Thus, some Americans seem to think that while some Muslims in Manhattan may have a right to build an Islamic Center near Ground Zero, somehow preventing the center from being built is not an abridgment of that right. Muslims still have the right to build whatever they want on private property in principle; they just can’t be allowed to actually do it.

I’ve said before that conservatives seem to interpret freedom of speech as a right to not be disagreed with. At The American Prospect, Adam Serwer has a couple of posts up on “Tribalism And Constitutional Rights” that go into this.

It’s not surprising that Sarah Palin would come out in support of Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s interpretation of the First Amendment as not guaranteeing freedom of speech, but rather freedom from criticism. Palin’s expressed similar beliefs before, basically that the First Amendment only guarantees her and her political allies freedom of speech, while any criticism of her statements is an unconstitutional infringement on her right to say whatever she wants.

Of course, if Palin really does have a right not to be disagreed with, that means other people do not have the right to express opinions about Palin’s opinions. Serwer then calls out the implied rightie understanding of “rights” as privileges that belong only to right-thinking Americans, e.g., people who think the way they do.

The other assumption we’ve seen on the Right lately is the idea that a view held by a majority of Americans cannot be bigotry. This assumes that empirical reality is subject to majority rule, which I suppose is a natural extension of the idea that “we create our own reality.”

But, as I keep saying, there have been plenty of times in American history when a majority opinion reeked of bigotry. Before the Civil War, only a minority of Americans, including northerners, favored a complete abolition of slavery, for example. Until relatively recent times, most whites genuinely believed whiteness conferred some inherent superiority over other races. A 19th century white person who was not a white supremacist by today’s standards was extremely rare. Abraham Lincoln himself was a white supremacist by today’s standards.

And you don’t have to go back to the 19th century. If you are old enough to remember the “school busing” controversy, when courts after Brown v. Board of Ed were ordering schools to be desegregated, you remember another time America lost its mind. In some places whites literally rioted in the streets, and not just in the South. I remember white mobs attacking buses carrying black children. Although I don’t know numbers, I believe a majority of white Americans wanted to keep segregation in effect. So, yes, majority opinion can be bigoted.

Serwer says in the second of his posts, “prejudice does not cease being prejudice because it is widely held.” It’s obvious a large number of Americans, I assume a majority, harbor some prejudices against Muslims. People can complain about being bigots all they like; lumping all Muslims together with the September 11 perpetrators is bigotry, by definition. Just because everyone else they know thinks the same way doesn’t make prejudice not prejudice.

Living in a nation where people enjoy certain inalienable rights means that lots of times other people are going to do things you don’t like. It also means people will express disagreement with your opinion. If we have a rule of law and not a rule of mob, that’s how it is. A free society depends on most people understanding that.

At Salon, Justin Elliott explains how the phony “ground zero mosque” issue was fired up by pathological whackjob Pam Geller and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. The article begins,

A group of progressive Muslim-Americans plans to build an Islamic community center two and a half blocks from ground zero in lower Manhattan. They have had a mosque in the same neighborhood for many years. There’s another mosque two blocks away from the site. City officials support the project. Muslims have been praying at the Pentagon, the other building hit on Sept. 11, for many years.

In short, there is no good reason that the Cordoba House project should have been a major national news story, let alone controversy.

There really isn’t. But now that it’s been jacked up into a Big Bleeping Deal, the Right is determined to continue Osama bin Laden’s dream of terrorizing America into destroying itself. As Michael Daly writes at the New York Daily News, blocking the building of the Islamic center is exactly what Osama bin Laden wants.

And it’s way past time to say plainly that Pam Geller is Osama bin Laden’s tool, agent, and spokesperson. Plus some other things I don’t say because I don’t care for vulgarity.

At Time magazine, Mark Halperin asks the GOP to not exploit the emotions fueling the “ground zero mosque” controversy as they campaign for the midterm elections. “Do the right thing,” he says. However, Halperin doesn’t make an argument that the issue won’t work for the GOP politically, so he’s whistling in the wind. Decency? Respect for human values? From today’s GOP? On what planet?

Halperin also repeats the assumption, and the fiction, that blocking the building of Cordoba House is “backed by the families of the 9/11 victims, in their most emotional return to the public stage since 2001.” One more time: No one has polled the families. We don’t know what they think. Yes, some of them have loudly denounced the project, while others have more quietly expressed support for it. Two major family organizations, Families of September 11 and the September 11th Families Association, have not taken a stand, one way or another.

Please, everybody, stop assuming that the survivors of the 9/11 victims are against the “mosque.” They are not all of one mind, and we have no way to know what a majority think.

This prediction doesn’t come from polls or from the I Ching. It comes from Bill Kristol, who writes,

The left has collapsed.

Its political support has collapsed. Public opinion polls point to a historic repudiation of the president and the Democratic party this fall—something on the order of a 60-seat Republican gain in the House. The GOP has an outside shot at taking the Senate as well.

There are three sure things in this world — death, taxes, and Kristol being wrong.

Also: At least one recent poll disagrees with Kristol.

Update: TBogg responds to Kristol with his usual measured subtlety.

Under a crassly misleading title “9/11 Families Stunned by President’s Support of Mosque at Ground Zero,” Andy McCarthy of National Review quotes Debra Burlingame as being “stunned,” as if she and she alone speaks for the 9/11 families.

She doesn’t. She claims to speak for some of the families though an organization called 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America, but from the group’s own website I can’t tell if anyone beside Burlingame, let alone other 9/11 survivors, belongs to this organization. Whatever her following, she has been the ringleader of a group of people opposed to any sort of memorial on the Ground Zero site that doesn’t reflect their extremist right-wing political beliefs and their vengeful, hateful views. She is, in short, a nasty piece of work.

Let’s review. First off, once again let me remind everyone that no one has polled the survivors, although plenty of people who were no where near Manhattan on September 11 keep presuming to know what they think and to speak for them. And if I were a survivor of one of those killed and not a mere eyewitness to the atrocity, I’d be looking for a lawyer who would sue the asses off anyone who presumed to speak for me.

Of the three principal 9/11 family associations — none of which are affiliated with Debra Burlingame —

The Families of September 11 have made no statement about the Islamic Center that I could find on their website.

The September 11 Families’ Association has taken no stand on the issue, but in a recent addition to the website have said only “Currently, there is a firestorm of opinion on this issue, with September 11th families coming out strongly on both sides.”

The September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a group founded and steered by families of September 11 victims, has issued a strong opinion in support of the Islamic Center.

May 20th, 2010

New York – Today, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a nationwide group founded by family members of those killed on 9/11 issued the following statement, which may be attributed to their spokesperson, Donna Marsh O’Connor:

September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows strongly supports efforts to bring an Islamic Cultural Center to lower Manhattan, near the Ground Zero site. We believe that welcoming the Center, which is intended to promote interfaith tolerance and respect, is consistent with fundamental American values of freedom and justice for all.

We believe, too, that this building will serve as an emblem for the rest of the world that Americans stand against violence, intolerance and overt acts of racism and that we recognize that the evil acts of a few must never damn the innocent.

And I’d like to point out that a few days ago, when I wrote a blog post about the statement above, I titled it “A September 11 Family Association Supports the Islamic Center.” That is accurate. I don’t presume that this one organization speaks for all family members. (However, the names of several survivors are listed on the website as members, so at least I am reasonably certain the organization represents more than one person.)

But let Debra Burlingame flap her lips, and National Review says 9/11 Families Stunned by President’s Support of Mosque at Ground Zero, as if Debra Burlingame were the designated spokesperson for all of them. And righties everywhere will point to what Debra Burlingame says as PROOF that ALL SEPTEMBER 11 FAMILIES are opposed to the Islamic center, and that their tender sensibilities are being crushed under the weight of those liberal “elitists” who actually take religious liberty seriously.

But the truth is, it’s the Right that is arrogantly assuming they know what the September 11 families think and presuming to speak for them. This is nothing but arrogance; it is their usual small-minded view that theirs is the only correct opinion, and anyone who disagrees is not a real American, and possibly not even a real human being.

Anyone who genuinely respects what the September 11 families suffered will shut up and let them speak for themselves. I understand that Debra Burlingame lost a brother that day, and she is welcome to speak for herself and those people who choose to associate with her. But that leaves out the majority of the September 11 families.

It’s obvious that the many survivors of the victims of September 11 are not all of one mind about the proposed Islamic center, either in favor or opposed. We can see from the public record that some are very much opposed to it, but others are very much in favor of it. For example, this was recently reported in the New York Times, about Mayor Bloomberg’s outspoken support for the center:

In a widely watched address, Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker who has worked with the mayor on education reform, criticized the planned center and encouraged Mr. Bloomberg to change his mind.

But Mr. Bloomberg was heartened to hear that some of the families of 9/11 victims supported his position; they told him so a few weeks ago at a fund-raiser for the memorial at the site.

“One hundred percent of them in the room kept saying, ‘Please keep it up, keep it up,’ ” he recounted. “ ‘Our relatives would have wanted this country and this city to follow and actually practice what we preach and what we believe in.’ ”

Please, do not let the twisted, bigoted haters like Debra Burlingame become the only September 11 family member whose voices are heard.

Update: What Josh Marshall says:

No doubt the president’s advisors would much have preferred not to address this at all, wish it had never come up. But it’s difficult to imagine any president doing otherwise. We learn again that saying you’re for “democratic values” and freedom actually means being for “democratic values” and freedom. Are we in the tradition of the opening and plural societies of Amsterdam and London and America? Or the closed and authoritarian ones of Madrid and Moscow? The infrastructure of the Republican party has chosen to hoist its sail to religious bigotry. There’s no other way to put it. The president has done the only thing he could possibly do which is to state clearly that we’re Americans and we don’t discriminate on the basis of religious belief.

Right now about half of rightie bloggerdom is arguing to the effect that we are not bigots and we support religious freedom but we want to stop the building of this [alleged] mosque because it upsets us and we don’t like it. In other words, they are in favor of religious freedom except when they disapprove of it.

For example, at a site called neo-neocon there’s an argument that while some Sufis may have a right to build an Islamic center in lower Manhattan, it’s wrong for them to do it because it upsets a majority of Americans.

And if the blogger at neo-neocon drops by here — toots, I was in lower Manhattan on September 11. I’m an eyewitness. Where were you? If the answer is “watching on television a long way away” I say my opinion overrides yours.

And I say “rights” are meaningless unless they can be exercised. To say of course they have a right to build the mosque, but we must bully and intimidate them and throw all kinds of fits and stir up all the enmity we can so they don’t do it — um, no. That is not “principle.” That’s a “mob,” even if it’s virtual.

Reminds me of —

JUDITH: Well, why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?

LORETTA: I want to have babies.

REG: You want to have babies?!

LORETTA: It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.

REG: But… you can’t have babies.

LORETTA: Don’t you oppress me.

REG: I’m not oppressing you, Stan. You haven’t got a womb! Where’s the foetus going to gestate?! You going to keep it in a box?!

LORETTA: crying

JUDITH: Here! I– I’ve got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can’t actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody’s fault, not even the Romans’, but that he can have the right to have babies.

FRANCIS: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister. Sorry.

REG: What’s the point?

FRANCIS: What?

REG: What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can’t have babies?!

FRANCIS: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.

So, neo-neocon is all in favor of a symbolic freedom of religion, as long as people she doesn’t like don’t try to express that right in ways that make her uncomfortable. Then, they’ve got to be stopped. Like most other of the bigoted Right, she stops just short of declaring that the government must stop the building of the mosque, but she wanted President Obama to come out against it.

But when Obama defends the building of the mosque in freedom of religion terms (”I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”) he is refusing to make the obvious distinction most ordinary Americans have managed to draw: that just because there’s a right to do something doesn’t mean it should be done.

This is like saying you have a right to express your opinion, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to let you do it if we disagree with you. And people wonder why I don’t try to reason with these people. You might as well teach metaphysics to rocks.

At a Ramadan dinner at the White House last night, President Obama came out in support of the Cordoba House cultural center:

But let me be clear: as a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are. The writ of our Founders must endure.

We must never forget those who we lost so tragically on 9/11, and we must always honor those who have led our response to that attack – from the firefighters who charged up smoke-filled staircases, to our troops who are serving in Afghanistan today. And let us always remember who we are fighting against, and what we are fighting for. Our enemies respect no freedom of religion.

I’m far from the first person to note that parts of the American Right come across as the American Taliban. Really, the most extreme of the whackjobs are just mirror images of the jihadists they oppose. If they are not as viscous and destructive as the Taliban it’s only because they know they’d do jail time if they got caught.

As you might imagine, this story triggered a paroxysm of Obama hate on the right blogosphere. They are certain more than ever that the “ground zero mosque” is just part of Obama’s plot to turn America over to the Caliphate.

If you think about it, U.S. history is mostly a struggle over who we are. The Founders launched the country with all of the highest ideals of the Enlightenment, yet they lacked the spine to abolish slavery or even free their own slaves. And from then on, we’ve gone through one spasm of racial violence and xenophobia after another — against African-Americans; native Americans; Catholics; Jews; Irish and eastern European immigrants; ethnic Chinese, both immigrant and native born; German Americans during World War I; Japanese Americans during World War II; etc. etc. Later generations look at the raging ignorance of their forebears and recognize that it was wrong. And then they pick a new group to victimize.

So, once again, we are challenged to determine who we are. Are we the idealists who respect liberty and the rule of law? or are we the brainless mob driven to destroy whatever it is we hate and fear?

And if any righties stumble onto this site and are reading this: The people who are trying to stop the building of Cordoba House are the brainless mob. The people who support it are the freedom-loving idealists. Keep that straight.

Ever since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, religious conservatives have tried to get around the very first provision in it — Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. “Establishment of religion” was understood to mean making any one religion the official state religion. Thus, Congress may not write laws that favor one religion over another, and the due process clause of the 14th Amendment extended this restriction on the power of government to the states (per Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 [1925] and other SCOTUS decisions) and any government chartered by a state.

And it’s interesting that this clause is the very first of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights. No doubt the founders were already concerned that religious factionalism was going to be a big issue in future America. They also had fresher memories of the religious wars of Europe than we do today.

As several of the Founding Fathers made clear (see, for example James Madison’s Federalist #10) they were concerned that some religious faction could take over the United States government. The First Amendment is our protection that even if followers of one particular religion did take over the White House and Congress, they could not write laws favoring their religion and imposing their beliefs on everyone else.

And for the past 219 or whatever years, American religious conservatives have complained about not being allowed to use government to enforce their religious beliefs and practices, while at the same time expressing fear that if X religious faction became a majority, those people might enforce their religious beliefs and practices.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I remember people speaking against John F. Kennedy for president in 1960 because they believed a Catholic president would take orders from the Vatican and allow the Pope to rule America. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote about this, “What seemed to me most deplorable was not the fact that so many people feared the strength of the Roman Catholic Church; it was that they had no faith in the strength of their own way of life and their own Constitution.” (h/t)

Yeah, pretty much. So in their ignorance and fear, the bigots (and y’all haters are bigots, whether you like it or not) form a howling mob to destroy the Bill of Rights, and tell themselves they’re doing it for “freedom.”

So over the past several days here on this blog I have documented that within a three-block radius of the area called Ground Zero there are at least two strip clubs, plus a number of bars (one popular with lesbians). This morning through googling I found a lingerie and porn video shop about two blocks south of Ground Zero that a reviewer calls “grimy” and “sleazy.” Those establishments have existed in close proximity to Ground Zero lo these many years, and no one seemed to care.

Yet talk about putting up a cultural center within this same area, one that won’t even be visible from the Ground Zero site, and suddenly people start squawking about “hallowed ground” and “sacrilege.” Give me a break.

At First Things, a Catholic site apparently dedicated to making Catholics look like bigoted, sanctimonious pricks (I’m not saying they are, of course), someone has published “Everything you need to know about Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf (Ground Zero Mosque Imam)” without bothering to mention that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf Is a Sufi. That’s kind of a big oversight, unless your intention was not to provide useful information but to propagate hatred. I don’t think Jesus would approve.

Betsy of Betsy’s Page writes,

But of course, our betters such as the Mayor and the White House which posted his remarks all think that the only reason that people would oppose such a mosque is due to unthinking prejudice against Muslims. Because, in their view, only someone of deep-seated bigotry would be against such a mosque. Well, then the majority of Americans are bigots.

I think that if most people could be taken on a tour of lower Manhattan to see where the Islamic Center will be built and its actual proximity to the World Trade Center site, and also what the Islamic Center actually will be, they’d realize it’s nothing to get worked up about. It’s obvious people are envisioning a big, classic mosque with a dome and minaret either on the Ground Zero site or across the street from it. Instead, it’s going to be a multi-purpose building tucked away on a narrow street where no one will be able to see it unless they happen to go down that street. Once again, it won’t be visible from Ground Zero.

However, sometimes a majority of Americans are bigots. Why else did it take so long to get rid of Jim Crow, for example?

Joe Klein writes,

Today, he [Krauthammer] invents a concept that can only be called “Intolerance Zoning.” His argument: we create areas where certain types of behavior are allowed or not–commercial and non-commercial, alcohol or no; we also make decisions about whether certain forms of usage–a Disney theme park near the Manassas battlefield–are appropriate or not. But all these decisions have one thing in common: they concern activities that are not protected by the Constitution. Freedom of religion is protected. Period. (Even by Krauthammer’s standard, the Mosque will be located two blocks away from Ground Zero–in a heavily commercial areas filled with office buildings, bars [some topless, if I recall], fast-food stores, betting parlors, cheap clothing stores…would his “hallowed zone” be impinged upon by those activities–or it just the presence of Muslims that defile a place where innocent Muslims were among those who died.)

Klein describes the neighborhood well. This is what the wingnuts are trying to protect as “hallowed ground.”

The New York Times has an article today on why Mayor Bloomberg is so adamantly in favor of the Islamic center. His family was subjected to anti-Jewish bigotry when he was a boy, and he’s taking the “mosque” controversy personally.

In a widely watched address, Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker who has worked with the mayor on education reform, criticized the planned center and encouraged Mr. Bloomberg to change his mind.

But Mr. Bloomberg was heartened to hear that some of the families of 9/11 victims supported his position; they told him so a few weeks ago at a fund-raiser for the memorial at the site.

“One hundred percent of them in the room kept saying, ‘Please keep it up, keep it up,’ ” he recounted. “ ‘Our relatives would have wanted this country and this city to follow and actually practice what we preach and what we believe in.’ ”

Finally, see Jonathan Chait, “When Shuls Were Banned in America.”