Religious freedom officials enter Ground Zero debate

By Michelle Boorstein

What position -- if any -- should members of America's primary government body dedicated to religious freedom be taking about the controversy near Ground Zero?

So far I've seen three of the nine members of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom connected in various ways to the dispute. One overtly opposes the Muslim center and questions if the organizers even have a right to build it. Another has written a piece defending the right of even radical religious groups to build houses of worship (though the piece raises unspecific general concerns about the center in question, leading the piece to come across, in my view, as critical). A third is among the leadership of an advocacy group strongly fighting the center, but says he personally has "no public position" on it.

Leonard Leo, chairman of the religious freedom commission, is on the board of directors of Liberty Central, a new tea party-like group run by Clarence Thomas' wife that lists as its primary objective: "to preserve liberty." The group in recent days has been highlighting at the very top of its Web site its petition to "oppose the Ground Zero mosque."

The petition, which has over 11,500 signatures as of this morning, takes a harsh and dismissive view toward the New York City project:

"Those who lost spouses, fathers, mothers, children and others do not wish to see a monument of "tolerance" so close to the ashes entombed in the ground of the World Trade Center," it says. "We have every right to believe based on the background of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf that this is a strategic move to slap the face of Americans," it says of the project leader.

Leo, who is also leader of The Federalist Society (whose libertarian and conservative members focus on "individual liberty, traditional values," among other things, according to their site), is drawing some criticism for his connection to all this.

Leo told me that he didn't even know Liberty Central was prioritizing the mosque
issue.

"I don't regularly follow what they do," said Leo, who said his major overlap with Liberty Central are issues of "constitutionalism and limits on national power."

He said he purposely hasn't taken any public position on the Ground Zero debate because of his role as chairman of the commission, whose charge is to "monitor the status of freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief abroad."

Leo emphasized that the commission's purview is not domestic, though it has in the past gotten very involved in U.S. issues it believes influences religious freedom overseas, such as a campaign it launched against extremism in textbooks used at a Virginia private school funded by the Saudi government. It also focuses on government interference with the free expression of religion (as opposed to repression by private organizations or individuals), though the commission has at times used its power to criticize governments for not doing enough to protect religious minorities.

Longtime commissioner Nina Shea wrote a piece earlier this month that didn't explicitly oppose the project but instead raised multiple broad concerns about radical ideas getting promoted in mosques, without alleging any specific such ties of Rauf.

Shea is also attracting some criticism, but she told me she thinks she's being misunderstood, that her goal was to raise the question about where the line is between national security and religious freedom.

Another commissioner, Southern Baptist leader Richard Land, questioned whether Rauf has the right to build so close to a place of national tragedy.

"I don't say that religious freedom means that you have the right to build a place of worship anywhere that you want to build them," he said earlier this month.

I asked Leo if he felt it was a good idea for members of a federal body promoting religious freedom to feed the opposition to a house of worship, and he said "each commissioner has to draw their own sort of lines about what is appropriate or inappropriate to do."

By

Michelle Boorstein

 |  August 25, 2010; 12:53 PM ET  |  Category:  God in Government , Under God Save & Share:                 
Previous: 1600 years after Rome's fall: a church and state lesson | Next: Wife of imam from Ground Zero center resists a new location

Posted by: ImmortalTechnique23 | August 26, 2010 1:33 AM
Report Offensive Comment

Posted by: Garak | August 26, 2010 9:03 AM
Report Offensive Comment

Posted by: imZandor | August 26, 2010 11:28 AM
Report Offensive Comment

Posted by: bloggersvilleusa | August 26, 2010 4:43 PM
Report Offensive Comment

The comments to this entry are closed.