As with any good fight, there are two sides of this controversy equally matched in fury: conservatives livid about the prospect of a Muslim community center being anywhere near the site of Muslim extremists’ attack on the U.S., and liberals who thought that intolerance died with Obama’s election and are extremely peeved to find it blossoming around them.

What amazes me most about this whole story is that it has lasted this long to begin with. As anyone who passed the eighth grade constitution test must know, religious toleration is one-fifth of our most integral, untouchable amendment. I understand that the events of Sept. 11, 2001 affected the lives of millions of people, but while they did change our way of thinking in terms of security and international relations, they shouldn’t change anything about our first amendment rights.

What’s more amazing are the contradictions inherent in conservatives’ arguments for the government to step in and disallow the building of the community center. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from coverage of the government bailouts and health care reform, it’s that conservatives hate federal interference in matters of private affairs. Why can’t people see that in asking for the city to block the Muslim center, funded privately by a woman and her husband, the leader of a Financial District mosque and real-estate investor born in New York, they are asking for something that, under any other circumstances, they would boisterously protest?

In economic terms, this flies fully in the face of free-market capitalism. If these people have legitimately procured funds and want to build a community center and mosque in Lower Manhattan, then by all means they should be allowed to do it. If members of the community are legitimately offended by the center, then let them protest outside once it has been built, but to preemptively block it from being built is effectively the same as prior restraint of publications, which, as we all know, is illegal.

Some conservatives have tried to appeal to people’s emotional sides, saying that allowing a Muslim community center to be built near Ground Zero is insensitive to the families of those who died in the World Trade Center attacks. This would make absolute sense—if the extremist branch of Islam that carried out the September 11 attacks was funding the center.

I assume, maybe foolishly of course, that the government has some means of background checking the funding behind any building, let alone one as controversial as this, and that such investigations would turn out any possible terrorist ties. Maybe that’s just my young, naïve faith in the government’s ability to protect us, but I still think that by now, any newsworthy findings would have made their way to the public eye already.

I realize that just by writing this article I’m adding to the publicity of this controversy, but I just needed to say that this whole hullaballoo is insane. When it comes down to it, this whole mess seems like the conservatives were seeking some attention and chose to attack with blatant racism a topic they assumed would get them some patriotic support. So tell me, what’s more insulting: allowing an apparently legitimately funded Muslim community center to be built near Ground Zero or using the memory of a national tragedy to spread their xenophobia?