Steamrolling distinctions...

Today our hero oversimplifies something nuanced because, um, thinking is hard:

The other thing is that over the weekend some kind of hair-splitting distinction opened up between the idea of publicly and forcefully acknowledging the legal and constitutional right of the organizers to place their community center at 51 Park Place in Lower Manhattan and supporting construction of the mosque. I sort of see what the distinction is. People have the right, legally speaking, to go stand on the sidewalk outside my office and scream obscenities at me when I go to lunch. But I really wish they wouldn’t do that, and I think sensible people would condemn the decision to behave in that manner.

But when it comes to matters of religion, I think this distinction gets a bit confusing. I’m after all not a Muslim. And if pressed, I’d have to say that I think Islam is a false doctrine. It’s not the case that there’s is no God but Allah, nor is it true that Mohammed is his prophet. If everyone collectively decided that nobody should ever build a mosque anywhere again, that would be fine by me. Which is just to say that people simply don’t actively support the construction of other people’s religious monuments.

First, apologies for the lengthy block quote. Torturing the silent millions with two whole paragraphs of our hero's prose is just unkind. Let's see if we can make up for it with a staggering display of wisdom. Get ready. Sit down. Brace yourself. You are about to have your mind completely blown: There are different kinds and levels of "support."

Have you recovered? Revelation of that magnitude can take a while to sink in. Put obscenely simply, the kind of "not supporting" we're talking about here is a bit harsher than the "not supporting" that one typically applies to other faiths' religious digs. It's worth distinguishing this argument from the legal stuff because the legal issue is uninteresting -- the sociological angle is the one worth pursuing. There are shades of grief, fear, bigotry, nationalism, and more. This is ripe stuff, and it's worth talking about, even if we have to (gasp) think and write with a little nuance. Dismissing the whole issue because "no one's into anyone else's religion" takes a special kind of stupid.