Cassimere Jeremiad

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."- The First Amendment

When the Founding Fathers were writing the Bill of Rights, the first thing they wanted to ensure was that all Americans would have the right to practice their religion of choice in peace. However, recently in New York, there have been hundreds of Americans protesting the construction of the "Ground Zero Mosque" (which is actually an Islamic community center, and about five blocks away from Ground Zero). Americans seem to be ignoring the very principals this country was founded upon. Therefore, a jeremiad I would write for today’s Americans would warn them of the dangers of unequal sharing of constitutional rights. If we start picking and choosing which groups of people are allowed to have these rights, then we become the country that our forefathers never wanted us to become.

Part of the problem, I believe, is the fact that most Americans think that all Muslims are terrorists who want to kill us all. Most of them just want to live their lives in peace without feeling as if they are being discriminated against. Americans just need to suck it up and admit that there is no real reason that the Islamic community center should not be built. They may not like the idea of an Islamic center so close to the site of the World Trade Center, but that’s just tough. Muslims are citizens too and they deserve the same rights as everyone else, and if we deny them these rights, then we become the tyrants our forefathers were escaping when they founded this country.