Backlash such an embarrassment

Published 1:11 pm Monday, August 23, 2010

There’s just no way around it. Prohibiting the building of an Islamic center near 9/11 ground zero would be an outright indictment and conviction of worldwide Islam as guilty of planning and executing this act of terrorism by a handful of extremist nutbags. Even to suggest it smacks of an assumption of the right of a Christian majority to dictate the limits of another religion’s rights. This is not about religious freedom. It is about religious bigotry and everyone involved is behaving badly.

The religiously intolerant are guilty of spreading their societal poison. The Republican politicians are guilty of seizing upon this as an opportunity to make political capital by inflaming intolerance at the expense of America’s credo of equality and religious acceptance all for a rally with their name on it. And finally, Obama is being cowardly in not condemning this overtly racist backlash for the shameful discrimination that it is.

It is an embarrassment of historic dimension that our country that wrote fairness and humanity into its Constitution should not denounce this behavior with the angriest possible commitment.

9/11 was a horrible, awful human devastation, but Islam didn’t do it. This kind of divisiveness degrades us all.

Harold R. Pettus

Everett