On mosques and flaming Qur'ans

I'll admit that I didn't give a great deal of thought to either the "Ground Zero Mosque" or the lunatic pastor in Florida and his Qur'an burning. I think I've got a pretty good nose for wedge issues, and frankly I really don't care who builds what where (unless it's a strip mall in a wetland) or who burns what holy book (unless it's the Star Trek Encyclopedia). Doesn't concern me. We've got bigger problems in this country today, don't we?

In fact, I'd paid so little substantive attention to these things (other than eye-rolling and trying hard to ignore them) that I didn't realize until today that some people, (center-right people, usually) had taken to using a "principled" stand against the Qur'an burning as a sort of implicit tit-for-tat with the GZM people.

We'll call off our rednecks if you just go build your heathen terrorist madrasa shrine to Vishnu some place else, deal?

I suppose this makes a bit of sense on the face of it. Lots of degraded hillbillies in America are mad that Muslim people want to build an Islamic center two blocks from the scene of the most vicious (and, let's face it, visually spectacular) terrorist attack ever perpetrated, and it was carried off by 19 Muslim men. Conversely, Islam is a religion that holds its holy things to be particularly sacred, and many radical Islamic clerics the world over can make political, social and spiritual hay for themselves out of a loony American evangelical Christian pastor holding a Qur'an burning. Let's call them both off, shall we, and maybe we can avoid some ugliness?

But that's missing the point. And badly. The point is, they should build the mosque and they should burn the Qur'an. That is, if we in this country actually give a good-goddamn about the actual principles that are the bedrock of our political culture. We certainly talk an awful lot these days about our "Founders" and their "intent" and all of the wonderful civics-classy stuff that makes America great: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death, etc. etc." We talk a big game, now more than ever, and now more than ever we equivocate. But free speech and free expression are not forces to be toyed with. They are some of the most powerful and vital impulses that mark all that is good and decent and evil and destructive about the human condition. We pretend we can make deals: "We won't do this if you don't do that." It does not work that way. Plugging the safety valve leads inexorably to an explosion. If you want a piece of wisdom that our Founders understood in a way that we do not, there it is.