Mosque? What Mosque.

Obama said this:
“Ground zero is, indeed, hallowed ground,” Obama said at a White House dinner celebrating the Muslim holiday of Ramadan. “But let me be clear: As a citizen and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”

Kind of what I’ve always thought we were about as a nation, establish laws (The Constitution, Bill of Rights) and obey/enforce them.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/41060.html#ixzz0xLsQ3SNa

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel01.html

“Many of the British North American colonies that eventually formed the United States of America were settled in the seventeenth century by men and women, who, in the face of European persecution, refused to compromise passionately held religious convictions and fled Europe. The New England colonies, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland were conceived and established "as plantations of religion." Some settlers who arrived in these areas came for secular motives--"to catch fish" as one New Englander put it--but the great majority left Europe to worship God in the way they believed to be correct.”

If you follow the link you’ll see that the Pilgrims (1620) and the Puritans (1630) sought refuge from religious persecution in the New World (America and later the USA.) I see a precedent here. They were followed later by Quakers(Pennsylvania,) Mennonites and Martin Luther’s Lutherans, among many smaller sects.



Another take on the situation courtesy of William Rivers Pitt


http://www.truth-out.org/mosques-muslims-and-america-darkness62409

“First of all, the Cordoba House is not a "Ground Zero Mosque." It is a Muslim community center, it is two blocks away from the site, and in a neighborhood that already has a mosque...and a strip club, and a lot of other stuff that makes talk about "desecrating hallowed ground" sound like the nonsense that it is.
Oh, and by the by, a lot of the people quacking about "hallowed ground" are the same cretins who refused to pony up funding for 9/11 rescue workers who desperately need health care when the bill came before Congress. I'm pretty used to broadband Republican hypocrisy - the core of their power in politics, after all, is their utter and complete lack of shame - but this just sends me over the moon. Money for continuing the Bush-era tax cuts for rich people? Sure. Money for people who charged into the fire and dust and smoke on that day, who are now dying by inches
because of their heroism? Not so much. And P.S., all Muslims are bad. Got that? It's the Republican way.”

What really steams me about all this mess is the lack of sensitivity offered by the GOP aided by the mainstream media that has turned this “hallowed ground” into a political football. It’s election season and more than any other time it seems that nothing is sacred. I didn’t get that sense from Obama’s speech. More an admonishment to remember who we are and where we came from.