Principle versus Policy

Monday night, as a guest on the Rachel Maddow show, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a Princeton University professor, was asked about the controversy surrounding the Mosque that is being proposed near the site of Ground Zero.

What she said perfectly explained why our country and the Constitution is easy in principle and becomes exponentially more difficult in practice:

Americans have what we call a principle-policy gap. You go out and do a survey and 90 percent of Americans will tell you, they agree and support freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion. But ask them if a communist atheist should be able to hold a rally on their neighborhood street corner and they‘ll say no.

So, this is, again, why we need to recognize that as Americans, the thing that makes America unique and interesting and such a great project in world history is that we meet vulnerability not with this kind of terrorized anxiety, but instead, by actually opening ourselves up, by saying—our government, our nation is strong enough to manage dissent. We are big enough and bold enough to allow our citizens to freely assemble, to worship as they see fit, and, heck, to even—I don‘t know, zone locally. These are the kind of American precepts that we need to be holding on to in this moment.

I couldn't agree more. We show our true nature at the times that are most difficult. The freedom to assemble is fundamental to America. It should never be a question of where and when, it is absolute. If we wavier on something as fundamental as that, what's next?