7 September 2010
Stephen T. BankoThe Haters at Home
Anyone who has tried to debate substantive issues with conservatives is familiar with their favorite tactic. They hear your argument, assign you an indefensible thesis, then argue forcefully against something you never said. For example, when the term “pre-emptive war” was insinuated into the national vocabulary, I voiced my strenuous opposition to war in Iraq. It was then my conservative host pounced. “So you are in favor of Saddam Hussein being allowed to kill Iraqis citizens and rape their women.” This “so when did you stop beating your wife?” tactic would be laughable if it weren’t embraced by so many otherwise thoughtful folks on the right.
For months, the issue attracted little attention and the attention it did attract was positive. Even a Rightie like Laura Ingraham had nothing but good things to say about it. But the Right functions best when it has something to hate and who better to hate than Muslims we are dying to protect in the sands of the Middle East?
Thus, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Fox News and the Right, which can’t really seem to function without someone or something to hate, have ginned up a controversy about the “mosque at Ground Zero,” which is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero. But that’s the position we lefties have been assigned by the folks who oppose activist judges while they seek to tear out the pages of the Bill of Rights they don’t agree with. So let’s begin:
Is it a mosque? It is a mosque only if any hospital or other structure with a chapel is a church. In an 11 story community center, one floor is set aside for a “prayer room.” That doesn’t seem to be such a radical notion but it has given a lot of people a mental wedgie. The actual mosque is a block or two away and hasn’t caused any outrage—yet. The “mosque” at the Pentagon, where some other people died on Sept. 11, 2001, hasn’t generated any criticism or outrage. The selectivity of the opponents of Park 51 makes one wonder what criteria must be in place before mass hysteria ought to be generated.
Is it at “Ground Zero?” Where once we thought that term applied to the foot print of the World Trade Center towers and adjacent structures, it now seems to extend to the whole of lower Manhattan. While proclaiming the sanctity of the environs surrounding the hole, opponents of Park 51 have little to say about the “gentlemen’s clubs” in the area that allow the financial masters of the universe to unwind with a pocket full of singles and face full of female genitalia. “Sanc-titty” is apparently a relative term. But if it is sanctity we actually seek and not sanctimony, why do we even allow the Japanese tourists to visit the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor? Why do the Japanese allow us to mourn nuclear holocaust with them at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? For that matter, why do we honor the “heroes” of the Confederacy that strove so mightily to destroy the United States of America?
It is to assign far too much credit for intelligence to the haters to ask them to pause for just a second and remember why the puritans came to this country. It is also beyond the realm of possibility to ask those same people to recall the religious bigotry that afflicted this nation in our not so distant past. It is unrealistic to encourage some people to think what the denial of freedom to any religion means to all religions.
But maybe—just maybe—we can ask the haters to justify the deaths of thousands of American men and women in the sands of the Middle East to promote “freedom and democracy” for Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan while denying it to Muslims at home.
Copyright by Buffalo Report, 2010