You Apparently Can Have It Both Ways

Suppose, dear reader, that you were a member of the group of people who are both Glenn Beck supporters and Ground-Zero Mosque detractors. The Venn Diagram there isn't completely overlapping, but I'd say that there are a fair number of both. In fact, maybe you are one of them. But suppose you were. Or, if you'd rather, suppose you're the opposite: you criticize Glenn Beck for holding rallies on certain dates, and you believe that Muslims should be able to build mosques wherever they want. Further suppose, humorously, that you were a logical human being, not given to contradiction.

You'd be caught on the horns of a dilemma. Either you have to support people's rights to do whatever they damn well please, regardless of the offense it might cause, or you have to support the rights of the possibly-offended to shut down other people. Or you'd be a hypocrite.

If you hold a rally which makes frequent reference to Martin Luther King Jr. in the same location as his most famous speech on the anniversary of said speech, you're probably going to offend some people. I don't care if you are the spiritual heir to his legacy, I don't care if you are the most respectful rally of people ever, I don't even care if you're Martin Luther King Jr. back from the grave. You're probably going to offend someone. If your sole criterion for whether or not something is acceptable is whether or not you might offend someone, then guess what, you're not going to get to do too many things because we live in a hyper-sensitive world and someone will probably be offended. And you certainly can't be seen to be co-opting Rev. King's legacy, even if that's not your intention. What people think about what you do is much more important than what you're doing, at least according to you, and if people think you're doing something, well then you're doing it.

Contrariwise, if you believe in the rights of people to do things because they're protected by law and the Constitution and whether or not it might offend some people, it's still right and free and so forth, then you can't complain when a guy you're not terribly fond of does things which you aren't terribly fond of, as long as they don't violate any laws. That's liberty: you may not agree with what someone is saying/doing, but you must fight tooth and nail for their rights to do it.

This is addressing perception, not facts. If you use perception as a justification, you're probably not going to like the results. Either you perceive all things the same way, or (inevitably) you're hypocritical. Which is why perception makes a lousy argument.

Now, the facts of the matter are that there is no mosque, it's not being built at Ground Zero, and it's not my place to make the decision whether or not to allow it to be built because I'm not living there nor do I have any connection to it beyond living in the same country as the events in question. I'm not abdicating opinion or responsibility; if it were up to me, I'd leave religion completely out of the site, but I hardly think that several blocks away, a community center which happens to be of a particular faith is in poor taste, given what I've heard of the other things in the area. On the other side, the rally, from the reports I've heard, sounded like it was fairly standard fare, without rioting or hate speech or what have you that was being predicted by some. However, if Glenn Beck and company didn't realize that they were holding their rally on the same day in the same place when they scheduled it (giving them the benefit of the doubt), then they at least realized it before they wrote the speeches because it sounds like they were making reference to MLK in a way which wouldn't make any sense unless they knew what they were doing, given the fact that Rev. King is hardly the poster child for their movement most of the time. I'm not offended, because again, I have no real right to be offended, but the balance of evidence points to them attempting in some way to co-opt. Hardly the first time, and surely not the last.

There have already been too many arguments made about both of these issues, I just wanted to point out their basic incompatibility. But no one is logical and everyone is hypocritical, so there's not much point in attempting to talk anyone out of their points of view.