Mayor Bloomberg and the Flushing of Religious Intolerance
As a non-New Yorker, I do not have a very well-formed opinion of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but his recent speech defending the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” contains one of least impeachable arguments I have seen a public figure make in favor of church-state separation under the U.S. Constitution. Rather than positing a general founding secularism that is just inaccurate enough to give Christianists a foothold for their mythologizing, Bloomberg grounded the mosque’ s right to exist firmly on individual rights, especially private property rights:
The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship, and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.
This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.
It is hard to see how anyone with real conservative principles could take much issue with that private property argument. Not that I assume most of the criticism has come from principle — fear and fear-mongering are easier on the brain, and get a lot more attention.
Of course, Bloomberg’s speech was not free of historical mythology, especially about New York as the birthplace of religious toleration. (His cited basis for this claim is the locally semi-famous “Flushing Remonstrance” of 1657, in which officials in the titular Queens village begged Director General Peter Stuyvesant to permit a Quaker meeting. In response, Stuyvesant jailed the officials and abolished the town government, so it was not really a big win for religious freedom.) This site’s esteemed co-founder painted early New York as something completely other than an island of peaceful pluralism, and even Bloomberg himself covers the fact that New York did not in fact have religious toleration until after the Revolution: the Catholic Church was not allowed to open its doors until the 1780s.
All of which points up the problem with most claims that the United States was “founded on” any particular modern idea we might choose to advocate. There were multiple moments of founding, and all of those were the product of political processes that participants could and did ascribe many different meanings to. One does not have spend much time reading the founding generation’s constitutional debates and newspaper essays to realize that they never fully agreed themselves what the nation they were founding was being “founded on.”
As a for instance: the principle Bloomberg cites is certainly present in Jefferson’s Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786) and Madison’s first amendment to the Constitution, but many of the Founders (especially those who identified with the Federalist party) continued to believe that government needed to embrace and employ Protestant Christianity. It also seems safe to say that at least some founding lids would have flipped if someone had tried to open a mosque next door to Federal Hall in 1789. On the other hand, some might not have. The early presidents were all aware that the U.S. would be contact with cultures around the globe, and took occasion to single out Muslims as a group that Americans were not set against, at least in theory. Either way, it is not clear that the Founders and their colonial forebears really have much guidance to offer us. We in this century have to make these decisions for ourselves.
An interesting comment on Newt Gingrich’s latest pronunciamento on the cultural center, by someone who knows a bit more about the medieval history of the Cordoba Mosque than Doctor Newt:
http://gotmedieval.blogspot.com/2010/08/professor-newts-distorted-history.html
Apparently, Abd-ar-Ramman believed in private property rights, too (at least, that’s what tenth-century Muslim historians wanted people to believe). A “true conservative,” of the Burkean variety, might follow his lead and try to buy out the proprietors of Cordoba House. Most of today’s “conservatives,” however, are nothing of the kind, and would rather see the state intervene to halt construction and “protect” the “sanctity” of Ground Zero, private property be damned.
Comment by Dave Nichols — August 10, 2010 @ 3:28 pm
I hear your argument and it’s a good one. But a couple of questions for you and your commenter:
1. Would you make it as vehemently if the building going in was, say, the national headquarters for the American Nazi Party or NAMBLA?
2. What if the situation involved a large rural landholder being told by the EPA he couldn’t do something he wanted to do on his private property?
Do private property rights rule the day in these situations? And lastly:
3. Would you support the project some are talking about (I don’t know if they’re serious) of building a gay bar near the same site, assuming it was also
on private property and didn’t violate rules regarding proximity of bars to houses of worship? It might offend the Muslims, who are not ok to offend
(Christians however are no problem).
Just asking. Conservatives are being inconsistent, but they’re hardly the only ones.
Good post though.
Comment by JT — August 12, 2010 @ 11:51 am
Thanks for your questions, JT. Jeff can certainly post his own answers, but since you asked for both of our opinions, here are mine:
1) I probably wouldn’t “vehemently” support the American Nazi Party, but they have the same rights to organize, peacefully assemble, and buy property as anyone else. If they want to raise $100 million and can convince someone to sell or lease them prime real estate in Manhattan, so be it. I leave it to others to defend NAMBLA, however.
2) If the landowner’s action is going to damage the environment outside the bounds of his or her property – that is, infringe on the property rights of others – then the EPA has a legal mandate to intervene.
3) “Support” in what way? Send money? Carry a sign? Join a Pro-Gay-Bar-Near-Cordoba-House group on Facebook? I probably won’t be doing any of these things. On the other hand, I’m not going to oppose a gay bar in Manhattan – or anywhere else, for that matter – just because it might offend Muslims or Christians.
Comment by Dave Nichols — August 13, 2010 @ 2:47 pm
Thanks for the great comments, Dave and JT. My answer would be that there is no private property right to engage in illegal activities on private property, so an organization devoted to underage sex would face some difficulties. And personally I have no problems with reasonable limitations on hate speech and hate groups, so no swastikas or Nazi posters or regalia on the streets, but I guess to save the Constitution, we would have to allow the Nazis to open a fancy downtown office if they could actually find the money and a willing owner. In any case, as Dave indicates, the free market will probably do everything necessary to keep NAMBLA and the Nazis and similar groups out of that very, very expensive area. A good conservative solution to JT’s hypothetical!
As the gay bar “project,” I am taking a wild guess that there are already a few gay-friendly establishments in lower Manhattan, so I doubt the Cordoba House people regard that as much of a threat. I imagine the bigger issue will be the protesters with intentionally offensive signs they will have deal with to go in and out of the building.
In the end, however, we are not talking about an offensive fringe group setting up shop in a national historic site. We are talking about law-abiding practitioners of a major world religion establishing a place of worship on private property in a major world city. Hard to see how that is even a choice we should have, unless the idea is to criminalize Islam as a whole, which I think is the idea for some of the people complaining about the “Ground Zero Mosque.”
Comment by Jeff Pasley — August 14, 2010 @ 2:14 am
Hey, good discussion. You all make good points. I would add one thought that there sometimes is a difference between what’s legal and what’s right.
That’s where things start to get crazy because people will typically argue that what’s legal is the be all and end all when it fits their purposes and
argue for a more “nuanced” view when it doesn’t. It’s understandable to me that the presence of a mosque at this site is hurtful to many of the 9/11
families. Should that be a factor or should they just be told to suck it up? Legally the answer has to be the latter, but in other areas people get in trouble for
far less aggregious slights (or perceived slights)when political correctness gets invoked. People can insult and ridicule Christians all day and night, but say something bad about the Muslims say something bad about Muslims and suddenly you’re a bigot.
I would point out too that although the place being built is claimed to have benign purposes, in the past there have been other such operations behind
which terror operations or funding takes palce.
Comment by JT — August 18, 2010 @ 11:52 am
Sorry for the double-post. Fat fingered it before I was done!
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