Matt Zeitlin

The idea that our commitment to religious freedom — both as a matter of rights and as a more substantive defense of pluralism — has to be sacrificed because of the feelings of some people whose family members had been killed on 9/11 never really made much sense. First of all, it could be possible that there are more important values that the sensitivities of those family members who organized themselves in opposition to the Park 51 project. And second, I doubt that anyone really supports the general proposition that if some relatives of 9/11 victims come out against a proposed construction project within a four-block radius of Ground Zero, then the project must be halted. I suspect that the main reason the voices of some of these victims’ families have been magnified by conservative political figures is because of those figures’ opposition to the project.

And then there’s the possibility that some of these people just have substantively wrong views and shouldn’t be listened to because they’re wrong.  Ben Smith quotes Debra Burlingame, the sister of the pilot whose plane crashed into the Pentagon and is a leader of families opposed to the project, saying some things that indicate that she’s just another conservative hawk who we ought not to take very seriously:

Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles Burlingame was the pilot of the jetliner that crashed into the Pentagon and who serves on the board of Keep America Safe, agreed that there is an emotional component but rejected the notion that the mosque issue is a “feelings” concept instead of part of a larger debate about different cultures and how the U.S. should engage with Muslim culture within the country.

“I do ascribe to the ‘clash of civilizations’ theory now,” said Burlingame, who has been among the main voices questioning the funding behind the proposed mosque, and the intents of Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind it. She said, as she did after Obama’s speech, that many Muslims have practiced peacefully in the U.S. before and after the attacks, but that Rauf has made statements supporting radical elements of Islam, and that the location was chosen to be provocative.

She criticized those, mostly led by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who are defending the project under freedom of religion, saying, “That’s a Western concept.”

“This is a different model,” she said, arguing that in the United States people “for generations had been raised on this concept of separation of church and state, and that you don’t trash someone because of their religion … but that’s not what we’re dealing with here.

If you think that Burlingame sounds a lot like Mary Cheney, or any conservative who wants to portray Islam not as a religion but instead as a political ideology, that’s because they co-founded Keep America Safe together. If you don’t agree with Mary Cheney or William Kristol on these types of matters, you don’t agree with Deborah Burlingame and her status as the sister of Charles Burlingame doesn’t make these opinions any more valid or worth heeding.

Can anyone explain why Nathan Bedford Forrest has *anything* named after him? Being a Confederate general is bad enough — like, really, really, History Greatest’s Monster bad — but being a Confederate general who was one of the most important members of the early Ku Klux Klan, perhaps the most pernicious, anti-American organization in our country’s history. Oh yeah, and the Fort Pillow Massacre.

This is just basic stuff. I would even trade all the stuff named after Sherman if the South got rid of everything named after Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Forrest, Stuart and so on.  Why can’t more stuff be named after Faulkner or Thomas Jefferson or George Mason or anyone who didn’t commit treason in defense of slavery?

UPDATE:

Oh God, this really is terrible. It’s from 2008, but I hadn’t heard about it until today, so it can be blogged in good-faith:

More than half the students at Nathan Bedford Forrest High School in Jacksonville, Fla., are black, and some members of the community object that they are forced to attend a school that was named in honor of a racist.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was a slave trader before the Civil War, a top-notch Confederate cavalry leader during the war, and the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee when it was over, according to University of North Carolina-Greensboro emeritus professor Allen Trelease, a Civil War scholar.

Forrest High got its name in 1959, when the Daughters of the Confederacy, angry about the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision forcing school integration, pushed for the name.

All 2,300 of the school’s students were white at the time. Now, 54 percent are black, and some feel it’s time to change the school’s name.

On Nov. 3, the Duval County School Board voted 5 to 2 against changing the name. The five members who voted to keep the name were white. The two who voted against it were the board’s only black members.

There have been far too many pixels spilled on the Park 51 Project/Islamofascist-Terror-Victory-Mosque for me to come in with anything too original to say.

But that’s never stopped me before!

It seems that the only coherent opposition to the Mosque’s construction rests on a belief that mosques are bad on their own. The argument-from-victims-sensitivity simply does not hold water. No one actually believes that some well-organized families of those who were killed on 9/11 have a veto — moral or legal — over every possible construction project within, say, a four block radius of Ground Zero. The sensitivity of families can only amplify opposition to a particular construction project if there is some other reason to oppose it. And if the hurt feelings of families are amplified by attention-hungry political figures, then it’s somewhat disingenuous to say that the supporters of the mosque are just opposing these families.

If the Park 51 project doesn’t meet muster — seeing as it is run by the exact type of moderate imam who, back in the days of the terrorist loving Bush administration, we were promoting as the face of non-violent, moderate Islam — then it seems like there really are prominent members of movement conservatism, like Newt Gingrich, who want to turn a conflict against a small number of murderers and would-be murderers into a conflict in which over 1 billion people are suspect and have to prove they aren’t terrorists or aren’t adherents to the ideology that lead to 9/11. This doesn’t strike me as wise. I would rather fight the hundreds of Al Qaeda members in Pakistan and Yemen, not the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world.