Bloomberg’s Hypocrisy on Religious Freedom

Bloomberg is exposed as a fraud when he contends that the islamic supremacist mega mosque at ground zero is a religious liberty issue. His concern for religious liberty does not extend to Christians and Jews. People who are trying to rebuild a Greek Orthodox church that was destroyed on 9/11 are being given a hard time by the NYC bureaucracy. And Bloomberg has shown a callous indifference towards the ability of Jews in Brighton Beach to hold synagogue services due to the noise coming from a park’s amphitheater, telling them they should conduct their services earlier. The only religious liberty liberals are concerned with and bend over backwards to accommodate are those of muslims.

God and Man at Ground Zero
by J.E. Dyer, Hot Air

In which a bemused observer tries to make sense of man, religion, and the state

Here’s my bottom-line problem with the concatenation of events and trends surrounding the Ground Zero mosque: I see privilege being accorded to Islam, as against situations in which the civil authorities have de-privileged Christianity and Judaism. The reflexive animus against America’s traditional major religions will be recognizable, in what I describe below, to every conservative. Yet in a situation where a very large group of Americans objects to the placement of a particular mosque, government authorities not only don’t privilege the objectors, they castigate them as bigots and override their concerns.

We can stipulate at the outset that none of the situations here is exactly analogous. The situation involving synagogues is not even in Manhattan; it’s in Brighton Beach. But in each case, the reflexes of the civil authorities have responded very differently, and the difference is telling.

There are two relevant tales of Christian developments near Ground Zero. One involves a Greek Orthodox church, St. Nicholas’, which was crushed by the collapse of WTC Tower Two on 9/11. St. Nicholas’ Church was across the street from the World Trade Center. In 2008, a deal was announced with the New York Port Authority to rebuild the church two blocks from its original site. But civil authorities objected to the church’s plans for a larger structure, with a dome and spire in the Greek Orthodox tradition. Their express concern was that the church not be taller than the World Trade Center Memorial.

There is no apparent concern about the Park 51 Islamic center being taller than the WTC Memorial (it is). It will not be built as a wholly new structure, of course. But on the other hand, the commercial skyscraper planned by the Port Authority will be a new structure, and it will tower over the WTC Memorial. The principles at work appear to be as follows: new commercial structures may be taller than the Memorial. An Islamic group may occupy a building that is taller than the Memorial and devote it to a religious purpose. But a Christian structure may not be built taller than the Memorial.

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