Ground Zero Mosque — Thinking Comes Later

I make too many dick jokes on here to post pictures of anything remotely related to 9/11. Thus, pic unrelated.

Hey, Muslims! Having trouble with your sunrise to sunset fast for Ramadan? Might I suggest working the night shift? It’s way easier to not eat during the day when you go to bed at sunrise and wake up a few hours before sunset. Unless… Is that cheating? Can you cheat at religion?

Everybody’s getting all riled up about Constitutional rights these past few weeks – both because the gay libertarian Bush-appointed federal judge made gay marriage legal in California, and then because a Muslim organization wants to build a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City. It’s raised all kinds of questions about just what freedoms we have here in America, and have divided Americans in the way that only abortion, American Idol, or any other given issue that the media blows out of proportion can.

I’d talk about the gay marriage thing, but it would pretty much come down to me repeatedly saying “Gay marriage should be legal everywhere,” accompanied by at least one totally inappropriate anal sex joke, which I think we’d all like to avoid. Also, seeing as the current controversy over Prop 8 is more about the power wielded by the judicial branch, I feel like I should stay away, as it would require me to do a lot of hasty research about separation of powers on Wikipedia and use the word judiciary far more than I’ve ever wanted to.

What I do want to talk about, though, is the Ground Zero mosque – namely, the controversy over Muslims building a religious cultural center really close to a place where a bunch of seriously misguided Muslims killed three thousand people.

A lot of the reaction I’ve seen on conservative blogs amounts to the idea that putting a mosque near Ground Zero is basically allowing terrorists to do a victory dance on the site of their one great triumph over Western hedonism. I’ve seen it referred to as Islamic domination and expansionism.

This, I think, plays into the increasingly common idea that Islam is less a religion and more a vast, all inclusive conspiracy to destroy everything we love, right up to and including the McRib. In this worldview, mosques aren’t centers of worship and community organization but rather StarCraft style barracks – once built, Osama bin Laden just has to push a button on his command console and a terrorist pops out, all ready to fight, and all it cost him was 50 minerals.

Here’s the thing: If Islam really is the warlike religion of hatred that so many right wing figures paint it as, we are so fucked, you guys. There are 1.57 billion Muslims on Earth, accounting for about 23% of the world’s population. As I see it, if a billion and a half people have all united behind a common cause, your best bet is to bend the hell over (unless their common cause is ‘Bake Free Pies For Everyone!’, in which case we have entered what is commonly known as Heaven).

But that’s just it – we’re not fighting 1.5 billion Muslims, we’re fighting fundamentalist Muslims, and there aren’t nearly as many of them (probably because one of their favorite battle strategies is to blow themselves up). The vast majority of Muslims, I would assume,* are fairly ordinary folks who adhere to a religion that, like most world religions, is based on the practice of not being a dick to other people, even if that one guy really deserves it.

*There are 1.5 billion Muslims and not a lot of them live in Oregon, so it’s been taking awhile for me to meet everybody. Also, Cat Stevens won’t return my phone calls.

And plenty of Teabaggers and hardline conservatives will disagree with that last statement, trotting out various blogs that show the supposedly evil and warlike nature of Islam by highlighting the heinous lines in the Qur’an. And in that case, go to Hell – seriously, now – because I guarantee you your religion has just as much fucked up, heinous shit in it. I mean, come on, people, the symbol of Catholicism is a man nailed to a fucking piece of wood, and it doesn’t get any better from there.

What’s more, those of you fighting against having a mosque near Ground Zero have already failed. Twice. In the past. There’s already two mosques within 12 blocks of Ground Zero that have been there for decades, and the reason that a new, larger mosque is being constructed in the area is that the two mosques already in Lower Manhattan are too small to accommodate the number of Muslims in the area who want to use them.

See, the Ground Zero mosque isn’t a victory dance at all – it’s a religious organization in America trying to serve its community (largely comprised of Americans) by purchasing property on the open market and then building on it. It’s the exact sort of freedom of religion that’s protected by the Constitution.

Yep, double edged sword, that freedom of religion. Sure, it’ll be there to help when you want to fight to get prayer in schools, but next thing you know it’s off helping Muslims build a mosque in their own damn neighborhood.

Truman Capps hopes that if he was wrong and Islam is in fact a globe spanning conspiracy that this blog entry will curry favor with his new Muslim overlords.