Freedom here, but not there

There can be no compromise in America on freedom of religion. It is who, what and why we are. Our soul cannot be negotiated.

We behold religious oppression elsewhere in the world. We lament the horror and suffering it causes. We rise nobly and bravely to oppose it.

Then some of us turn around blithely and seek to oppose increments here.

But increments, qualifiers and conditions aren't freedoms. They're constraints.

We cannot declare one day, as did President Obama, that a religious group holds an inalienable right, then declare the next, as Obama also did, that, rights aside, we need to think about the religious group's wisdom in its free exercise.

The Muslim religion did not kill 3,000 of our countrymen on Sept. 11, 2001. Some of us must get that cancerous lie out of our heads.

A band of murdering creeps did those crimes. To hold the religion they disgraced accountable is the same as holding Christianity accountable for Timothy McVeigh.

It is to smear every genuinely religious person with the hypocrisies and delusions of those professing his faith.

If our ignorance, fear and anger force a Muslim religious group to move its planned mosque and Islamic center from a site a few blocks from Ground Zero, then -- quite simply -- we will have denied freedom of religion.

And we will have sent a clear and dangerous message into all the religiously volatile world that Americans hate Muslims and that we refuse to distinguish any of them from murderers.

The distinctive greatness of soaring American principle -- the thing that separates us from those we oppose, deplore and lament -- will be less great, indeed not great at all.

Let's not try to pass this off as, or compare it to, a legitimate zoning question having to do with a land-use master plan or traffic factors. This has nothing to do with that. It is about not liking a religion and wanting to impair that religion on that basis.

And let us not punish a religion because one of its leaders once said America is imperfect. America is, in fact, imperfect, as evidenced by our behavior on this issue.

And let us not seek, as a conservative columnist in The New York Times endeavored the other day, to invoke some kind of legitimate symmetry and pressure point between "two Americas," the one with constitutional rights and the one with cultural animosity.

Desperate for leadership, we find, of course, that our politicians let us down. That goes for everything from Obama's second-day backtrack to Newt Gingrich's crazed and demagogic likening to Nazis of those affiliated with this proposed center.

This brazenly dishonest and blindly ambitious man -- Gingrich, that is -- ponders running for the Republican presidential nomination. So he must compete with Sarah Palin. Lacking any sane territory to her right, he plunges there anyway.

Nearly every Republican condemns this proposition, since it's a handy talking point for the midterms. But a couple actually have shown brave restraint, though not by standing up for free religion. They've merely dared to say they'll stay out of the debate.

Democrats tend to modulate according to individual political circumstance. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, trying to get re-elected, declares that he thinks the center should go somewhere else.

New York Gov. David Paterson, worrying about opinion polls, wants to put the Muslims' religious freedom on the negotiating table, or, more to the point, on the city grid. That is to say that maybe the Muslims cannot be extended any American freedom on the southern tip of Manhattan, but maybe they can enjoy their freedom 30 blocks uptown.

But then they don't have freedom at all. Nor, really, do any of us. After all, it might be a crazed professed Baptist or Catholic or Presbyterian or Episcopalian or Unitarian who sins on a grand scale next.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.