Islamophobia
By: Eric Schmidt
It is sad that a country that claims to offer religious freedom would be so prejudicial in its application of that ideal. There is a serious disconnect in what many Americans see as a fair implementation of the First Amendment. Citizens of this country enjoy their freedoms and like to promote the benefit of those freedoms. But when it comes down to it, many of those same citizens don’t actually want to follow through on granting Constitutional rights to groups or individuals they find distasteful. This unfortunate phenomenon was made painfully clear this summer with the legally baseless and unfounded disparagement of the so called ‘Ground Zero Mosque’- which is actually two blocks away from Ground Zero in a restaurant district.
It has been said that it was in poor taste for an Islamic group to plan for the construction of a religious center near the site of terrorist attack orchestrated by Muslim radicals. That may be true, at least in the minds of some, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that they have the fundamental right to be there and to build whatever they wish there. Part of the difficultly of living in a functioning democratic state is that it can be hard sometimes to adhere to the principles that our Founding Father’s laid out for us. Justice Kennedy said it best in a concurring opinion in the brief for the Texas vs. Johnson flag burning case. “The hard fact is that sometime we must make decisions we do not like. We make them because they are right, right in the sense that the law and the Constitution, as we see them, compel the result.”
I have heard the argument that certain Muslim countries would not allow for Christian centers of worship to be built anywhere. This makes it even more important for us to show them that we do not hold ourselves to a similar standard, and we should not. Our victory is made in the point that we stand by what we preach, even in the faces of those that see it as a weakness.
