Placing a Flag in Lower Manhattan

My friend Gregory Laughlin sends a thought on the controversy over the Islamic community center being built near the 9/11 site:

While all American cherish our rights of free speech and free exercise of religion as guaranteed in the First Amendment, there are some things which just shouldn’t be done. They are disrespectful. And everyone should recognize them as such.

Between my hometown of Poplar Bluff, Missouri and St. Louis on old U.S. 67, there is a lone grave of a Union soldier from the Civil War. One day I was driving by and I noticed that someone had placed a Confederate flag on the grave. I’m certainly not opposed to people placing Confederate flags on the graves of Confederate soldiers. Those soldiers, after all, fought for the Confederacy and supported its cause, sometimes with their life.

But I have a real problem with someone placing a Confederate flag on the grave of a man who gave his life fighting against the Confederacy. It was pouring down rain, but I pulled off the road anyway, walked up to the grave, and removed the flag. As I did so, I thought how I would like it if someone placed the Rising Sun on the grave of my father, who was a decorated combat veteran in the Pacific Theater during World War II.

The North and South are again one nation and we have been at peace with Japan for nearly 65 years. Yet placing a Confederate flag on the grave of Union soldier or placing the Rising Sun on the grave of someone who fought in the South Pacific is profoundly wrong and disrespectful.

Many Muslims are peace-loving and were as shocked and saddened by the attacks of September 11 as any Christian or Jew. Many are loyal citizens of this nation. Such Muslims should understand why putting a mosque at or near Ground Zero is profoundly wrong. This should not be allowed to happen.

I hope doing this isn’t ungracious to my friend, but I should say, since readers often assume you agree with anything you pass on, and this is a controversial matter, that I don’t think he’s right about this.  A community center and mosque is not an enemy flag and building it two blocks away is not like draping the flag on top of someone’s grave.

To ban a mosque simply because it is a mosque is to make Islam without differentiation the enemy. Every Christian would expect a critic to distinguish him and his church from the vicious, lunatic extremist groups, and object to his rights being curtailed because of the Peoples Temple. As elite and legal opposition to Christianity rises in this country, Christians are very unwise to try to make religion a basis for discrimination.

So I agree with Dave Blum about this . We have rules for this sort of thing, starting with the First Amendment, and they apply to everyone without distinction, and if a mosque meets the requirements, it meets the requirements.