I have listened to many, many arguments about whether an Islamic group should be allowed to build on a site they already own and have used as a school for over two years. The fact that the site is in Lower Manhattan, as was the World Trade Center, is the focus of all the screeching. The most eloquent speech was Mayor Bloomberg’s announcement of the center on August 3. Reacting to building criticism from those trying to make political points by bashing Muslims and calling it a sacrilege to have an Islamic center and mosque in Lower Manhattan (Sarah Palin among them, predictably), Bloomburg said:

“Political controversies come and go, but our values and our traditions endure – and there is no neighborhood in this City that is off limits to God’s love and mercy, as the religious leaders here with us today can attest.”

I remember when I was in my early 20s, when a Mormon chapel was proposed a few short blocks from our home in Southern California. A local minister, who sat on the city building commission, blocked the building for years. Eventually the building was built, but not before lots of hurt feelings and animosity, all resulting from the religious bigotry of one individual. About the time we left Washington, DC, two years ago, the only truly ugly lot in the neighborhood was razed to make room for a Mormon chapel, but city religious leaders complained. As the newspapers said at the time, the rhetoric is all about height restrictions and traffic, but underneath it all was religious intolerance aimed at Mormons. A similar argument is in full swing in New York right now: the new Islamic center will be built within sight of Ground Zero. It’s a bogus argument. Wall Street is in Lower Manhattan. Half the city and New Jersey across the river is within sight of Ground Zero. It’s really about tolerance.

Such bigotry is not new. Jews have experienced it for centuries. Catholics experienced it in the early years of this country’s founding. But ultimately, freedom of religious belief and thought has won the day.

Let’s not succumb to the same prejudices of our fathers. Muslims have just as much right as anyone else to build in Manhattan. It’s time to show the world that we are what we preach, unlike the cowards who hid behind religion when they crashed planes into the World Trade Center. We are better than they were. Tradition holds that when Catholics in Salt Lake City needed a cathedral more than a century ago, the president of the Mormon Church assigned specific Mormon skilled laborers to help with the construction of the Cathedral of the Madeleine as a demonstration of religious tolerance. If we aspire to be true Americans, we Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and atheists will line up to help with the construction. That is what America is all about.