Kathleen Parker is an allegedly conservative columnist at the Washington Post, but if there’s any evidence she is, in fact, conservative, it’s certainly scant. About the only support for this allegation comes from liberals, who always cite her as a “conservative” they like.
Here’s her latest. You be the judge:
The Ground Zero mosque must be built
Right — you love it already, don’t you? An exercise in morally preening, fatuous sophistry now follows:
The mosque should be built precisely because we don’t like the idea very much. We don’t need constitutional protections to be agreeable, after all.
This point surpasses even all the obvious reasons for allowing the mosque, principally that there’s no law against it. Precluding any such law, we let people worship when and where they please. That it hurts some people’s feelings is, well, irrelevant in a nation of laws. And, really, don’t we want to keep it that way?
Parker goes on to say that she, personally, would prefer the mosque to be built somewhere else, but hey:
But why do so many Americans feel this way? The answer is inherent in the question. Feeling is emotion, which isn’t necessarily bad, but it bears watching.
Reason tells us something else: The Muslims who want to build this mosque didn’t fly airplanes into skyscrapers. They don’t support terrorism. By what understanding do we assign guilt to all for the actions of a relative few?
Fasten your seat belts, because here comes some prime idiocy:
Some might wish that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is behind the proposal, were more sensitive, though opinions are mixed. Others have argued that a moderate Muslim such as Rauf is just the sort of person we hope will help influence a more-moderate Islam. Might an Islamic center near the spot where the religion’s worst adherents slaughtered thousands, fellow Muslims among them, be useful to that end?
These are all reasonable arguments. But the more compelling point is that mosque opponents may lose by winning. Radical Muslims have set cities afire because their feelings were hurt. When a Muslim murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam, it was because his feelings were hurt. Ditto the Muslims who rioted about cartoons depicting the image of Muhammad and sent frightened doodlers into hiding.
Yes, you read that right: Theo van Gogh was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam because his killer’s feelings were hurt.
The idea that one should never have one’s feelings hurt — and the violent means to which some will resort in the protection of their own self-regard — has done harm rivaling evil. It isn’t a stretch to say that the greatest threat to free speech is, in fact, “sensitivity.”
This is why plans for the mosque near Ground Zero should be allowed to proceed, if that’s what these Muslims want. We teach tolerance by being tolerant. We can’t insist that our freedom of speech allows us to draw cartoons or produce plays that Muslims find offensive and then demand that they be more sensitive to our feelings.
Nobody ever said freedom would be easy…
This is the caliber of thinking and writing that passes muster at the Washington Post these days, as the decline of a once-great newspaper continues apace.
Maybe she should consult this book before she embarrasses herself and her employer again.
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