Like Bob Dylan, I grew up in the heartland and I always identify with his song about having God on our side: “My name it means nothing, my age it means less; the country I come from is called the Midwest.” It really is another country. And now the eternal culture war is on again, with the heartland defending New York from itself. The same thing happened after 9/11 when flag-waving and Bible-thumping became so intense in the Midwest that New Yorkers—the ones who had actually suffered a devastating attack—were horrified. 

 

            This time our defenders in the rest of the country are foaming at the mouth about Cordoba House, which they call the “mosque at Ground Zero.” Useless to say it won’t really be at Ground Zero but two blocks away on an undistinguished commercial street. Unimportant that it will be flanked by two taller buildings and hardly loom over the area as claimed. Irrelevant that New Yorkers are famously ecumenical believers in religious tolerance. We cannot be trusted to safeguard our own hallowed ground. We must be bullied into righteousness by the real red, white, and blue Americans, who can’t stand New York anyway—so congested, so full of black people and immigrants, so unreliable on religion. The real Americans are going to show us. Think it’s your city? Nyah, nyah, nyah.

 

            They keep talking about “the mosque at Ground Zero” as if it were going to be as big as Saint Peter’s (Catholic) or St. John the Divine (Episcopalian) or Temple Emmanuel (you know), when in fact what is at issue is a Muslim community center, something like the YWCA or the Jewish Community Center, with a swimming pool and gym and one room for prayers. Personally, I will be happy for downtown New Yorkers if they get another swimming pool. Since Cordoba House is modeled on the JCC, maybe it will let anybody join who wants to swim; it might even have free water exercise classes for people with disabilities.

 

            Of course, the real Bible punchers don’t like the JCC any more than they like the idea of Cordoba House.  Last summer, the Westboro Baptist Church, based in Topeka, Kansas, demonstrated across the street from the JCC with signs that said “Jews Killed Jesus” and “America is Doomed.” They’ve been doing that in front of various Jewish centers around the country. This is the same group that is famous for demonstrating at the funerals of GIs killed in Iraq and Afghanistan with signs saying “God hates Fags.” Apparently the basis of their theology is that the American empire is going down because of rampant homosexuality.  

 

            But the freakout about the “mosque at Ground Zero” is not just coming from a handful of far right Christian nutcases. Now even Democratic officials are joining in: hello, Governor Patterson and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Do you really need to pander to nativism?

 

            Oh, but wait, this is about our identity as a white Protestant nation. The real red, white and blue Americans always resist alien cultural values. They resisted the values of indigenous people by exterminating most of them. They resisted the Catholicism of the Irish with riots, and the alien customs of Jews with restrictive covenants, and the foreign ways of Asians with exclusion laws and internment camps, and now they are resisting Latino/as with anti-immigrant campaigns and border fences. And of course they have been resisting black cultural values ever since they brought the first African-Americans here in chains.  

 

            Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is trying to resuscitate his political career on this issue, said yesterday:

 

             "The folks who want to build this mosque -- who are really radical Islamists who want to triumphally [sic] prove that they can build a mosque right next to a place where 3,000 Americans were killed by radical Islamists -- those folks don't have any interest in reaching out to the community. They're trying to make a case about supremacy. That's why they won't go anywhere else, that's why they won't accept any other offer."

 

            If the people behind Cordoba House have no interest in reaching out to the community, it is nothing short of a miracle that their project got unanimous support from the local community board. That’s no easy trick in NYC, where community boards have to approve all land and development projects. The local community boards haven’t been so soft on the Atlantic yards or the expansion plans of Columbia or NYU. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before some pundit says the Lower Manhattan community board has been taken over by Al Qaeda. 

 

            Andrew Brown, writing in today’s Guardian, has an interesting take on freedom of religion: