Editorial: Constitution should settle mosque issue

Editorial: Constitution should settle mosque issue
Copyright by The Chicago Sun-Times
August 17, 2010
http://www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/2605226,CST-EDT-edit17.article


Twice over the weekend it happened again: two national Republican leaders evoked the principle of "majority rule" to argue against the building of a mosque near New York's Sept. 11 Ground Zero.

As if it were so simple.

As if individual rights should ever be subject to a public vote.

First there was Ed Gillespie, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, making the argument on a Sunday morning TV talk show that President Obama should oppose the mosque because polls show that 70 percent of the American people oppose it. In not opposing the mosque, Gillespie sighed, Obama has revealed "a very disdainful view of the American people."

Listening to Gillespie, we could not help but wonder: If 70 percent of the American people said he should shut up, would he shut up?

Or might he finally discover a higher principle that trumps majority rule?

Then there was Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, who cited the same opinion polls on the mosque controversy to conclude that Obama is "disconnected from mainstream America."

Perhaps so, we could not help but think, but the president is not "disconnected" from the American Constitution, which Cornyn plainly is.

Gillespie, Cornyn and many others opposed to building the mosque insist they're all for religious freedom, but fear the presence of the mosque would be disrespectful to the memory of the 2,750 people killed by terrorists in or near the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

This, of course, is untrue. And Gillespie and Cornyn know it, unless they slept through every civics class they ever took.

Branding all Muslims on the forehead with a big "T" for terrorist -- which is precisely what opponents of the mosque are doing -- because of the horrific actions of a handful of extremists who claimed to be acting in Allah's name is the essence of intolerance. It is a fundamental attack on freedom of religion.

And all the opinion polls in the world won't make it right.

If the majority is always right, then the lynch mobs in cowboy movies are the good guys.

If the majority is always right, every Jim Crow law that once denied blacks equal rights in the South was defensible.

If the majority is always right, Barack Obama's parents were wrong to get hitched in 1961, a time when interracial marriage was illegal in 22 states and opposed by 90 percent of Americans.

Majority rule is at the heart of any democratic republic, but our nation's founding fathers understood that it can be an oppressive bully if left unchecked. In the Federalist Papers, they warned of "the violence of majority faction." Several decades later, in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville more elegantly rephrased it as the "tyranny of the majority."

From start to finish, the American Constitution is a tension-filled balancing act between majority rule and minority rights, most especially in the Bill of Rights. Consider the things Congress must not do, in the name of the majority, to the rights of the individual -- deny, abridge, infringe, violate or disparage.

That is to say, Mr. Gillespie and Sen. Cornyn, keep your hands off our most sacred freedoms, including our freedom of religion. Opinion polls cannot justify bigotry.

We know we're telling most readers nothing they don't already know, so please forgive the somewhat lecturing tone of this editorial. But day after day, as we write on the big civic issues of our times, we are struck by how often they reveal a frightening lack of appreciation for our nation's most fundamental values.

Nothing else explains the public's widespread approval for imprisoning "enemy combatants" indefinitely without charge or trial, for blocking a mosque near Ground Zero, for opposing gay marriage, for politically correct speech codes on college campuses, for letting federal snoops dig through our library records or eavesdrop on our overseas phone calls.

In our fear, we tolerate the erosion of our freedoms and grow more intolerant of the freedoms of others.

Did we all sleep through civics class?