Now here's something to think about

From Gideon's Trumpet:

One of the best comments on that New York Mosque brouhaha comes from John Podhoretz, Editor of Commentary magazine, in the October 2010 issue:

“The proposal [to construct a mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan] has ignited a new culture war in the United States in which unusual lines have been drawn—with unabashedly secular liberals sternly admonishing religious conservatives about the transcendent importance of the freedom of religion. Suddenly, even property rights and building “as of right” have become sacrosanct to people and institutions who have opposed private projects in important locations all over New York City on the grounds that, say, they might cast a shadow at certain hours over a few hundred square feet in Central Park. And yet they feel free to express disgust at complaints about a mosque a few hundred feet from where the Twin Towers were destroyed—a building that would certainly cast a shadow over a Ground Zero memorial.”

But that’s how it goes in the land-use biz, doesn’t it? People whose hearts profess to bleed for the plight of the poor are usually in favor of the use of eminent domain for redevelopment which disposesses the poor en masse for the benefit of large corporations. They seem untroubled by the fact that the core feature of redevelopment is for the redevelopers to receive the taken land from which the poor have been evicted (and for which the public has paid top dollar), for peanuts or even free.