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.