If you are liberal or atheist and you oppose the Park51 community center, you have been bamboozled

It's infuriating, but probably not too surprising, how many conservatives don't understand the First Amendment. Regardless of how you feel about the Park51 community center, you cannot mount a legal challenge to it. This should be obvious to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with what it's (supposed to be) like to live in America.

What is equally infuriating, but far more surprising, is how many liberals and atheists/skeptics, while at least understanding the constitutional aspects of this case, have expressed disapproval with the community center. They say they recognize the right of the builders to go ahead with the project, but they say it's a bad idea, it's "in bad taste", it's "insensitive" to the victims of 9/11.

If you are one of those people, you have probably been bamboozled.

If your mental picture is of a towering minaret, its spire casting an ominous shadow over the ashes of the World Trade Center, you have been bamboozled.

If your mental picture is of a more modest building, but still with a Middle Eastern architectural style that some might find provocative as it stands across the street from the site of the 9/11 tragedy, you have been bamboozled.

If your mental picture is of this modest Middle Eastern-style building, it's spire just barely visible between two skyscrapers as one stands at the sight of Ground Zero, you have been bamboozled.

If your mental picture is of a completely Western very modern inviting building, a corner of it just barely poking over the top of another nearby building, you have been bamboozled.

If your mental picture is of this nice modern building, completely invisible from the World Trade Center site and not anywhere you are likely to pass going to and from Ground Zero, housing a fire-and-brimstone style Muslim-equivalent-of-American-Evangelicals congregation, you have been bamboozled.

If your mental picture is of this nice modern building, far removed from Ground Zero, whose primary purpose is to allow a congregation of a few hundred very progressive New York Muslims to peacefully come together for their weekly worship, guess what, you have still been bamboozled.

If your mental picture is of a nice modern building, far removed from Ground Zero, whose primary purpose is to provide Muslim families with wholesome activities they can do right in downtown Manhattan, such as basketball, swimming, i.e. all the things you'd expect to find at your local YMCA, you are still being bamboozled.

If your mental picture is of a nice modern building, far removed from Ground Zero, whose primary purpose is to provide all New Yorkers with wholesome activities like basketball, swimming, etc., just like the way your local YMCA is open to the public and, though it might have a small chapel, has barely anything to do with Christianity whatsoever... ding ding ding, you've got it right!

And if you are still opposed to that, and you call yourself a liberal, or you call yourself a secularist? I don't know what to say...