The mosque - this made me think

Ace:

Kat from Missouri writes:

We are in the midst of losing an important ideological battle. A battle we cannot afford to lose because it is at the very heart of this war. The enemy believes that freedom and democracy, particularly the freedom of religion, is our most egregious sin and must be destroyed. He thinks it makes us weak.

We are, at this very moment, about to rip out one of our most basic freedoms and hand it to him on a silver platter.

I believe we should step aside and let the mosque be built. Not only that, we should defend their right to do so as we have defended nothing else. If we do not, we hand the enemy a powerful weapon that he can use to bloody us with again and again. He will use it to recruit more men by pointing to it as the truth of OUR oppression of "his" people, our hypocrisy to the very idea of freedom and its real weakness. Who knows how many of our men and women in or out of uniform will pay the price for this one moment?

I cannot and I will not abide handing the enemy this weapon.

Ace comments:

It would never even occur to me, or any decent person, to erect a Museum of American Achievements in Aviation in Hiroshima.

This is not a joke -- I am not saying a museum celebrating the bomb. I am saying a museum that does exactly as I said -- notes American achievements in aviation. Not the Enola Gay, but the Wright Brothers, etc.

The museum I am talking about, hypothetically, would not be baiting, nor celebratory of the bomb, in the least. It would just be a museum of American advancements in aviation.

But of course no sentient being could possibly fail to see how Japanese would take it as a direct provocation, and a nasty reminder of the bomb that fell on Hiroshima 6 August 1945.

And if I were so stupid, tasteless, and Asperger's-afflicted to have suggested such a museum in the first place, if Japanese then told me "That brings up horrifying memories," I wouldn't then arrogantly double-down and begin explaining to them how intolerant they're being, how irrational they're being, how unfair to my enthusiasm for American airpower they're being.

I would say, "Damn, I didn't think of that! I intended this as just a museum of aircraft, but I can in fact understand how you, a Hiroshima survivor, would even 50 years later have a rather more negative feeling about American airplanes in the sky that I do. Thank you for informing of this -- my bad. I'll put it up somewhere else."

Because -- why wouldn't I put it somewhere else.... unless my intent all along was in fact to remind Hiroshima residence of what happens when you defy the Big A? (A as in America.)

If I didn't have that in my heart, why would I want to visit such unwelcome and painful reminders on a population that experienced an awful tragedy 50 years ago at the hands of my fellow Americans?

There's not a lot that non-New Yorkers can do. Legally it's simply a local zoning issue. If they own the land then legally they can build the mosque. I still like the idea of building a gay Muslim nightclub next door - instead of go-go boys they can have dancing goats.