I was so pleased that a sitting politician actually came out against the Islamic supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero that I completely overlooked this crucial aspect of Governor Paterson’s offer of state land for mosque. His heart is in the right place in trying to get the triumphal mosque away from Ground Zero, but giving state land for this would amount to New York state sponsorship of Islam. “Shariah law in the U.S.: Gov. Paterson offers to make Islam the state-sponsored religion of New York,” by Bryan Fischer at Rightly Concerned, August 13 (thanks to Miriam):
When Gov. David Paterson of New York stepped into the breach to offer a resolution to the exploding controversy over building the Ground Zero mosque, he quite deliberately offered to grant Islam a favored status under New York public policy that is denied to Christian churches.
Here’s what the governor said (emphasis mine): “If the sponsors were looking for property anywhere at a distance that would be such that it would accommodate a better feeling among the people who are frustrated, I would look into trying to provide them with the state property they would need.”
He added some mumbo-jumbo about a competitive bidding process, but that was obviously just for show. If he wants to provide state land for a mosque, trust me, he will find a way, and his liberal friends will back him to the hilt.
Offering to provide government property for a house of worship normally would provoke howls of outrage from our hypersensitive friends on the left, who see grotesque breaches of the wall of separation between church and state even where the wall of their fevered imaginations doesn’t exist.
Can you imagine the firestorm that would have erupted had the good governor offered to find state property for a Christian church? He’d have been dragged into court by the ACLU so fast it’d give him a nosebleed….