Several years ago, I got into a debate with a libertarian friend about the effects of media violence on the real world. I maintained that the people who produced violent movies and video games were in some way responsible for the actions of young people trying to emulate what they saw. My friend mistook my opinion for an advocacy of censorship and stuck up for the producers’ First Amendment rights, but this wasn’t the case; I was merely lamenting the fact that the producers weren’t behaving responsibly, in the interest of society. Sure, they have the right to produce whatever they want, it’s just a shame they don’t consider the consequences of their actions. It’s a no-win situation, and as a result we all suffer.
The same thing has been going on for years regarding guns. The right to bear arms has overshadowed any consideration of where the fault lies whenever somebody goes postal. Then of course there’s the supposed right to talk on your cell phone while driving. Hey, this is America! – we’ll claim all the rights we can.
We have a similar situation with the proposed Islamic center in New York. Sure, the Muslim community has a right to exercise their religious freedom in building their center at the site they’ve chosen. But they’re not thinking through the consequences of their actions, i.e. the animosity it will create among short-sighted citizens and the harm it could do to Muslim-Christian relations. The problem isn’t that they’re being disrespectful as some claim but, rather, disruptive.
It’s easy for liberals to come down on the side of the Islamic center simply because conservatives are so jingoistically lockstep against it. What once had been a sleeping dog is now up and snarling, so I would have to ask the Muslim community: with relations between the two major faiths already near the boiling point, why would you want to kick a snarling dog when it has the potential to get the whole pack riled up? You made the choice to put the center only a couple of blocks from GZ, and to my mind that’s not a whole lot different from Rockstar Games making the decision to release Grand Theft Auto III or the NRA defending private ownership of assault weapons. Exercising your rights is all well and good, but at what cost?
It’s a slippery slope, admittedly. Other American cities, without any such “hallowed ground,” have seen protests against the construction of mosques, so some might extend the above argument to discourage exercising rights whenever any segment of the public gets upset. Well, let’s face it, there’s always going to be somebody upset about something. Some folks in Murfreesboro TN may not cotton to the idea of a mosque in their town, but they don’t exactly have a ground-zero argument to fall back on – just ignorance. And I suspect that if something had been built at GZ in NY by now, an Islamic center in its shadow would be no big deal; it’s the heel-dragging that keeps the wound open and the tempers hot.
It’s that never-the-twain situation again, putting self-interest ahead of social concerns, and it looks like it doesn’t apply only to white folks. If those behind the Islamic center assumed a little responsibility and moved their project to a less sensitive location, it would go a long way toward defusing a no-win situation.
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