Some very foolish things have been said about the proposed Cordoba Muslim Cultural Center in downtown Manhattan, the majority of them, it seems to me by people who wouldn’t know how to find the site if they were dropped off at the closest subway stop.

Follow up:

While it’s predictable that Republicans and Tea Party adherents would take a stance against anything that might involve a lot of dark-skinned men milling around, I am just as offended by comments like those made by Senator Harry Reid and New York Governor David Paterson, and hinted at by President Obama, that while Muslims have a right to build a place of worship and education, they should refrain from doing so in close proximity to the site that was devastated by terrorists who claimed to be Muslim in September 2001 because it demonstrates a lack of sensitivity to the families of those who lost their lives there.

Not surprisingly, the loudest voices have not been those of the survivors but people with tenuous ties to the events who crave media attention.

I call their attention to a speech made some years ago by a Republican president at the site of an even larger loss of American lives. The Civil War was not yet over in November 1863 when Abraham Lincoln dedicated the cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Three thousand one hundred fifty-five Union soldiers and 4,408 Confederate soldiers breathed their last breaths in that place. Although the cemetery was intended as a memorial to the Union dead, Confederate bodies were not shipped back to their states for seven years.

When Lincoln penned his brief remarks, it was scarcely four months since the battle ended. Yet Lincoln did not berate or demonize the enemy. In a manner not unlike that with which many people view the attacks of 9/11, Lincoln saw the war as a test of whether a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…can long endure.”

But Lincoln didn’t overvalue the efforts to create a shrine; in his eyes, that had already been done: “we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract,” he said.

All the bellowing and snide remarks about the proposed institution do nothing to honor our own dead. In a sense they still walk among us as we go about our lives.

When Lincoln said, “It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced,” I don’t think he imagined some of the hideous events that followed the discontinuation of Reconstruction. I think he envisioned a nation whole and free. Sadly, in an attempt to appease the Southern white establishment, we compromised that vision, and the vitriol lives on.

It is not enough for the President to invoke the Constitution. Instead, he needs to remind us that we are all a part of one nation, and Muslims have been part of it since the outset. We conveniently forget that many of the Africans who were enslaved on these shores were in fact Muslim; that many of them converted to Christianity does nothing to diminish that.

All of us might recommit ourselves to Lincoln’s closing words:

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us –

“that from these honored dead we take increased devotion

“to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion –

“that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,

“that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom,

“and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

On September 12, 2001, we had the sympathies of most people on the planet. How many more do we want to alienate?