The Shadow-gloom and Weight of the Sacred

One of my favorite blogs is Tuesday Morning Quarterback by Gregg Easterbrook on ESPN's website. Because it is primarily a football blog, he only writes from the end of August until the end of the football season. He's a really smart guy and a good, entertaining writer. If you don't like football, you could probably still scan his weekly posts and find material of interest. This most recent Tuesday, he published these thoughts on the "Ground Zero Mosque" debate and, because I completely agree with his perspective, I'm posting them here.

Why Isn't the Pentagon Mosque on the Front Page?

There's a small chance you have heard about a plan to build a mosque near (not "at") Ground Zero in New York. The controversy is puzzling on many levels, most important, that this is America! Freedom must not be an empty concept. Freedom of religion means freedom of religion. The basic bargain of the First Amendment, as regards speech as well as faith, is that the sole way to protect the right to opinions and beliefs is to protect all opinions and all beliefs, keeping government out of the business of deciding which ones we like or don't like.

The people who attacked the United States on 9/11 might have called themselves Muslims, though clearly were breaking the tenets of their faith. All religions have produced a few murderous fanatics -- we don't hold this against the faith when Christianity or Judaism is involved. Baruch Goldstein, raised as a Jew, used a machine gun to murder 29 Muslims in 1994 in Hebron on the West Bank. Goldstein was a monster, not a religious believer, and was breaking the tenets of the faith he claimed. No sensible person would say that because of Baruch Goldstein, synagogues should not be built on the West Bank. Timothy McVeigh, who was raised as a Christian, murdered 168 people with a terrorist bomb in Oklahoma City, and it's clear to everyone he was breaking the tenets of his faith. Why can't we understand the same thing about the 9/11 killers? No one would object to a Christian church being built near the Oklahoma City terror bomb site.

Here's what really puzzles me -- with all the snarling on display regarding the proposed downtown New York mosque, there's been no discussion of the mosque that already exists inside the Pentagon. Islamic services are held in an interfaith chapel quite close to where a plane flown by murderers struck on 9/11, and that has caused no problems. The Washington Post buried the story on Page A-11, and most newspapers and newscasts haven't mentioned the Pentagon mosque at all. If the people who work inside the Pentagon can see past their differences and embrace religious tolerance, how come this is impossible for people such as Newt Gingrich?