Now Nancy Pelosi says the opposition to the Ground Zero mosque is an organized conspiracy that needs to be investigated.

70% of the American population opposes it.  That’s quite a conspiracy, Nancy.

Ladies and gentlemen, the legal questions are boring, and worse, they’re not the point.  It’s not a question of law; it’s a question of manners (or propriety, as Andrew McCarthy puts it below).

No one credibly questions the legal right of Muslim landowners to use their property in any lawful fashion. Legality is an irrelevant issue, even if the back-tracking Obama now wants to pretend it is the only one he was really talking about on Friday night. The question here is propriety.

That’s a fine piece, by the way.  Read the whole thing here.

Of course, the president is beyond hopeless on this.  It was politically wise to keep his mouth shut, and it’s already amply in evidence that he’s not politically wise, so no surprise that he voted “present” when he opined.  (His approval rating is down to 41% as I write, by the way.)

I suppose it’s at least somewhat unfashionable to say it out loud, but even mainstream Islam is deeply intolerant of many things we consider customary and usual in the United States.  Moreover, it is much more mainstream than radical Islam thought that said prohibitions must reign, even (especially?) when they conflict with secular law.

Remember though, this mosque will build bridges!

For all of the soulless nitwits wringing their hands and fretting about who can demonstrate the most sensitivity, Muslims enjoy a tremendous amount of freedom to practice their religion in the United States.  This is freedom most everyone embraces without even trivial further thought, much less any consideration of reciprocity.  (Hey, who’s up for some Christian missionary work in Saudi Arabia?)

I welcome the courageous Muslim voices speaking out against the Ground Zero mosque (and there are some).  Of particular note:

This is not a humble Islamic statement. A mosque such as this is actually a political structure that casts a shadow over a cemetery. [The Mosque] is going to be used around the world, especially in Islamic media. From the ashes of this destruction comes the flourishing of Islam and I think that is just the wrong message. It is not good for America or for Muslims…We are Americans who happen to be Muslims, not Muslims who happen to be Americans.

From sunup to sundown Muslims are fasting and working on putting our needs tertiary to our God and our country, not what we need. They are abandoning these principles and saying, ‘Well, this is what we need and we are victims if you don’t let us do this. And we can do it, so we are going to.’ I think that is un-Islamic. – Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, president and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy

Bravo, sir.  Your words are potentially very costly, and you have my utmost respect for uttering them anyway.  Thank you.