Greeting HHB devotees! Yes, I've been terribly off the ball for about a month now, and since I'm about to start grad school, you can probably expect things to just get worse. But I promise that slowly and surely I'll finish detailing the trip to Bonnaroo, and periodically chronicle movies I've seen, political issues that irk me, and, of course, the Reds' pursuit of the post-season (first place baby!).
But today, I have to address an important political issue:
Firstly, for the last year or so, we have been hearing debate about the Mosque that is planned to be erected near 9/11 Ground Zero in New York. Commentary has intensified over the last month or so as plans continue to be pushed along, and came to something of a head on Friday when President Obama jumped into the fray stating, "... Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And 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." As one might expect, Conservatives were quick to decry the remarks, Sarah Palin using a sassy tweet to vent her ire.
Now, the issue itself is thorny and complicated, but what's wholly depressing about the situation is the way that the media has covered the President's remarks. I was first made aware of them by an AOL news headline titled, "Obama slammed, praised for backing Ground Zero Mosque." Though it did its job of making me aware of what the President said, the problem with this headline is that it immediately takes the emphasis off of the actual issue at hand (whether or not to build the Mosque) and places it in the context of political debate. The article focuses less on the debate of whether building the Mosque is the right thing to do, and more on whether it was politically expedient for President Obama to comment.
Cable news coverage (both Fox and MSNBC are culprits - I can't bring myself to watch CNN) was similarly bent. "Should the President have gotten into this mess?" one reporter asked an analyst. The real question is, "Is the President right about this?"
The answer is a resounding, seemingly obvious, "Yes!" But, the debate politicized (I thought we weren't supposed to politicize 9/11), Obama was forced to walk back from his comments last night, saying, "I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That's what our country is about." Sure. What really happened, of course, is that Obama faced pressure from Liberals who felt that his position was untenable in addition to the usual Conservative opposition to anything the President does or says.
For a President whose campaign was run on a platform of honesty and principles, this issue has certainly shown that politics trumps morality. The GOP playbook is to say in effect that the President is disobeying the will of the people, with polls showing that nearly 2/3 of Americans do not believe that the Mosque should be built. Newt Gingrich has even ludicrously called for a moratorium on building the Mosque until Saudi Arabia allows for churches and synagogues to be erected. "Enough with the double standard," he said, and it's refreshing to know that there are those who think America should be on a moral par with Saudi Arabia.
Gingrich and Sarah Palin are both on record saying that they have no problem with the building of Mosques in general, and claim that the American people feel the same way. Yet all over the country we've seen numerous protests whenever a new Mosque is erected anywhere. The danger of continuing to let this intolerance progress is that America will go the way of Switzerland, outlawing Mosques altogether. That may sound absurd, but Americans are uniquely touchy regarding Islam because of its relatively small practice in the country and the lingering memories of 9/11.
But this issue is an example of why the will of the people should sometimes not be followed. People in large groups occasionally behave irrationally, and taking the easy path to intolerance instead of working to understand a perceived "other" is an example. President Obama's remarks on Friday were a courageous sacrifice of political capital in order to make a moral stand, which is why it was all the more depressing to see him walk them back on Saturday. Obama followed his abovementioned remarks on Friday by saying, "This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable." His own commitment to this issue should have been similarly unshakable, and not prone abandonment at the first sight of political turmoil.
If President Obama was going to get into this issue at all, he should have been in all the way. As it stands, he's himself allowed politics to cloud morality.
If interested, ABC's This Week had a pretty good round table that discussed it at length.
No comments:
Post a Comment