But the lies cannot rest. Not about this false story, or any other that can quickly mobilize the fearful, and ignorant constituency. It's election season after all, and the sheep (you may them know as bigoted conservatives, and equally bigoted liberals), must stop worrying about the shitty economy, the false wars, the looting of America, the crumbling infrastructure, and instead, get riled up about issues that cowardly politicians can actually take a stand on, like should an imaginary mosque be built, or not? Unless you're the President of the United States, who, of all people, does not have an official position.
I'm not at all surprised at the hostile public reaction. People are genuinely terrified at the thought of Islam + Ground Zero. It's a primitive response, and the media is serving the fodder to the toddlers. But it's all understandable. 9/11 was only nine years ago, and the children are having a nightmare flashback. Quite frankly, I feel sorry for the sheep. First the media manipulators lies to them by saying that the turban freaks are out to kill them, and then some fuckheads with shit for brains decide to build a holy shrine near the place where the turban freaks are accused of destroying. God damn. Have some mercy on the sheep.
The whole idea should've been shut down at its inception, not because its an Islamic terror training center, or a high-tech cave for Manhattan's Islamic dwellers, but because its fucking retarded to hype the "Islamic threat" to America, and spread propaganda about the Islamic world for nine years, and then build an Islamic center on what's considered sacred ground in America.
What's most disturbing about this charade is that it reveals a creeping trend about the conservative sheep's attitude towards Barack Obama. The most ignorant remark that is made by some right-wing pundits, and politicians is that President Obama is a publicity agent for Islam, which the sheep eats up. How this stupid talking point has made it this far into the Obama administration indicates a great failure in the American media to inform American public opinion. Fox News charlatans, and right-wing bloggers are largely responsible for the growth of this outrageous belief in American society, but the absence of an honest and objective counterweight to Fox News in the cable news media landscape is also a big factor.
At every interval of America's downward slide into hell, non-stories like the "ground zero mosque" will be used by the shameless media to affirm American ignorance rather than to connect Americans to new truths, and to inform them about the evil nature of the War on Terror. Arthur Silber has made the most ethical, and poignant point about this non-story, writing, "given the U.S. government's ongoing campaign of slaughter and destruction targeted at Muslims in various locations around the world, a real mosque at Ground Zero would be a serious gesture of reconciliation, if that word were finally to have some genuine meaning."
A couple of years from now, when the Christian fundamentalists really jump off the whole "religious liberty" bandwagon that the American founders helped jump start, a lot of people will regret not defending religious liberty that is now seriously threatened at Ground Zero. What better place is there to stand up for such a fundamental right? Religious liberty is a sacred American right, and Ground Zero is sacred American land. If Washington D.C. was filled with good men, instead of cowards, demagogues, traitors, and screwballs, they would not let this moment pass without imprinting into the post-9/11 American mind the grave importance of religious liberty for all. Words in the Constitution, and Bill of Rights don't matter to the sheep. They need to hear their shepherds speak the words in present time. They need to be told the truth; that their safety is not threatened by Islamic centers, and never will be. But, obviously, Obama is not up to the task. November is coming soon, and the blind mobs want to feast on Democrats this time around, so a sacred right needs to be sacrificed.
Here is a little history about James Madison's gift to America. From the book by the American historian Adrienne Koch called Madison's "Advice To My Country":
"The first test of Madison's commitment to religious liberty "found a particular occasion for its exercise in the persecution instituted in his County as elsewhere against the preachers belonging to the sect of Baptists then beginning to spread thro the country." The Madison Autobiography continues:
"Notwithstanding the enthusiasm which contributed to render them obnoxious to sober opinion as well as to the laws then in force, against Preachers dissenting from the Established Religion, he spared no exertion to save them form imprisonment and to promote their release from it. This interposition tho' a mere duty prescribed by his conscience, obtained for him a lasting place in the favor of that particular sect."
The story persists that Madison never forgot his childhood experience of hearing a Baptist preacher deliver a sermon to passerby through the iron grates of his jail window! The sensitive boy needed no books to see the gross repugnance of laws that put honest men in jail for their ultimate personal beliefs about the Creator.
In any case, by April of 1774 Madison had thought so long and hard about the meaning of religious liberty that he wrote to his Princeton friend, Billy Bradford in Philadelphia, envying him for living where the privileges of religious liberty might be enjoyed, while he as a Virginian had to contend with a country stifled and deprived of those "generous principles." He then penned an eloquent passage elaborating the good consequences already visible in Philadelphia from its "generous principles" of religious liberty:
"Foreigners have been encouraged to settle among you. Industry and Virtue have been promoted by mutual emulations and mutual Inspection, Commerce and the Arts have flourished and I can not help attributing those continual exertions of Genius which appear among you to the inspiration of Liberty and that love of Fame and Knowledge which always accompany it. Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise every expanded prospect."
Madison's part "in the great transactions" of history began when he was elected a delegate from Orange County to the Revolutionary Convention in Williamsburg in the late spring of 1776. He was a junior member, twenty-five years old, circumspect and shy, but he was already known to a few of his colleagues for his enlightened beliefs and formidable reputation for learning. Thus in spite of his youth, he was assigned to the committee to frame "a declaration of rights, and such a plan of government as will be most likely to maintain peace and order in this colony, and secure substantial and equal liberty to the people." The famous Virginia Declaration of Rights served as a model for subsequent American constitutions and was reprinted and circulated throughout America, in England, and on the Continent. George Mason was the principal draftsman, but Madison, as we shall see, left a memorable impress.
In one article of the Declaration of Rights, Mason had drafted a provision that ". . . all men should enjoy the fullest Toleration in the Exercise of Religion according to the dictates of conscience." Madison felt that this provision for toleration fell disappointingly short of "the generous principles" in which he believed. He therefore wrote a substitute provision which read, in part, that ". . . all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of it [religion] according to the dictates of conscience; and therefore that no man or class of men ought, on account of religion to be invested with peculiar emoluments or privileges. . . . " Madison was hesitant to address the Convention and sought an important sponsor to strengthen the chances of adoption. He chose Patrick Henry to move it, but Henry rapidly gave ground in the debate when he was angrily asked whether he intended to disestablish the church, and the amendment lost. Madison then drafted another amendment, which declared merely that "all men are equally entitled to enjoy the free exercise of religion." This amendment passed and became part of the Virgina Declaration of Rights.
To realize the significance of Madison's contribution, one should take note of at least the following essential points: First, the linguistic change from toleration to religious freedom marks the beginning of a major break with previous liberal political thought. John Locke's influential doctrine of religious liberty had simply called for toleration. Perhaps the best brief formulation of the defective nature of toleration as such was stated by Thomas Paine: "Toleration," he wrote, "is not the opposite of Intolerance, but it is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding Liberty of Conscience, and the other of granting it." This advance on the European liberal tradition in itself should invalidate the conventional wisdom which asserts that American political thought is purely derivative, and nothing more than "Locke write large." It is to Madison's credit that he came to this position on the basis of his own reflection.
Second, Madison was not the only American to reach this position. Jefferson had already come to the divide between toleration and freedom, as is clearly shown in his draft of a Virginia Constitution which he sent to the Convention from his seat in Congress, in Philadelphia. Jefferson chafed at being detained in the Continental Congress because he believed that "the whole object of the present controversy" was the work of framing a new government. Nevertheless, the draft he submitted was considered at a late point on the floor of the Convention, and as the editor of the Jefferson Papers, Julian Boyd, discovered, "more of Jefferson's constitution was incorporated in the Virginia Constitution than he remembered or most historians have discerned." It is Mr. Boyd's judgment, also, that the adoption of Jefferson's provisions on religious freedom, if they had been adopted, would have spared years of grinding legislative struggle to secure full religious freedom. To a great extent, this may also be said of Madison's original amendment.
Third, Madison's efforts in the Virginia Convention could not have gone unnoticed by Thomas Jefferson. Their shared beliefs on so profound a principle as religious freedom became a powerful bond which initially ranged them alongside each other and led to the close friendship and remarkable half-century collaboration between them. In this, as in many later instances, we see each man reaching positions independently as the result of private inquiry and meditation. We also see what became a pattern of mutual re-enforcement and fraternity that made their joint efforts a formidable force in winning each step towards an open society. (Koch, pg. 13 - 19).
