The Imam's decision to build on "Ground Zero" has succeeded in achieving exactly the opposite effect of that which he ostensibly desired.

When last I addressed the proposed "Ground Zero" mosque, I sought, not so much to argue for one position over the other but, rather, cut through the morass of emotion and drivel that has accumulated around this rapidly growing controversy by unpacking what I take to be but some of the fundamental issues to which it has given rise.

I argued that, in spite of one's disdain for the idea of constructing an Islamic mosque just so many feet from the location of the most severe terrorist attack in American history, an outrage that resulted in the loss of nearly 3,000 innocent American lives mercilessly extinguished by fundamentalist Muslims, an understanding of, appreciation for, and attachment to American liberty should engender, at the very least, a profound distaste for any and all attempts to impede its realization through governmental coercion.

I was quick to point out, though, that this reservation regarding the prospect of utilizing government to obstruct a lawful transaction between a consumer and a seller of private property has absolutely nothing to do with "Diversity" or "Freedom of Religion," as supporters of the mosque would have the rest of us believe. Only a simpleton of the first rank could so much as fleetingly entertain the notion that invocations of "Diversity" are intended to do anything other than subvert both sober thought and, what amounts to the same thing, all conceptions of Western Civilization and America that exclude as a key ingredient self-denigration; and the barest familiarity with the religious landscape of America, to say nothing of New York City, discloses in no time that no one — and least of all any Muslims — has been denied their freedom to practice religion in America.

The "freedom" or "liberty" that we have long experienced and enjoyed as Americans, though always incomplete and imperfect, would nevertheless find itself potentially imperiled by any governmental efforts to undermine the property rights of the parties involved in the mosque affair, for our freedom is nothing more or less than the totality of liberties and freedoms, rights and duties, that constitute the legal association that we call the United States, and the particular arrangement of property relations that our ancestors bequeathed to us — an arrangement insuring the widest possible dispersal of power — is an indispensable feature of that system. The right to what we usually call "private property," like every other right, is not unconditional, of course; but unless assaults on it are kept to a minimum and escape all semblance of arbitrariness, it will cease to be a real right at all.

It has become a commonplace among the opponents of the "Ground Zero" mosque to protest to the effect that what is legally right is not necessarily morally sound ("Just because one has a legal right to do something doesn't mean that it is the right thing to do"). This, obviously, is correct as far as it goes, but it doesn't go quite as far as most people think. That I have the legal right to lie to my spouse doesn't relieve me of my moral obligation to always be truthful with her, and that I am not legally bound to worship any deity doesn't exempt me from my moral and "religious" duty to worship the only Deity that I recognize. But my argument regarding the "Ground Zero" mosque involved none of this kind of reasoning — a fact, I suspect, that was lost on those who read it.

Every human relationship is an association of one type or the other. That is, every such relationship is distinguished by the sorts of conditions that are peculiar to it. Now, the United States of America is what is called a "state," or, more popularly, a "nation-state." That a state is an association of human beings is obvious. The terms in which this association should be characterized, however, are not so much. The character of an American state, not unlike that of any other, is eligible to be read in more than one way, but it seems to me that for much of its history, the dominant impulse has been to understand America primarily in terms of what has been called a "civil association." The associates of a civil association are related to one another with respect to, not some "common good" or shared engagement, but their recognition of the authority of law. A civil association, then, is a legal association, and America, I am contending, has, for the most part, been conceived as such.

But a legal association, it is crucial to realize, is a moral relationship, for the considerations in which it is framed are neither commands nor orders but, rather, rules or laws specifying, not actions, but conditions qualifying whatever actions in which associates choose to engage. In other words, the associates of a legal or civil association are individuals who are free to make their own decisions and pursue the ends of their own choosing. Since, then, the morality of individuality — what is vulgarly called "Individualism" — and the freedom or liberty that is intrinsic to it can be properly provided for only by a civil or legal association, every effort to upset the delicately balanced ecology of laws of which it is constituted in order to impose upon the state a quite different kind of character — say that of a corporation, or what Michael Oakeshott called an "enterprise association" — is an effort to diminish moral agency and undermine the moral goods of individuality and liberty to which untold millions of Americans have acquired an impassioned commitment.

To put it simply, the right to own private property is a moral prerogative, for it doesn't "entail," "imply" or "presuppose" a duty to respect the rights of others to exercise that right in ways that one may find objectionable; the right to own private property is this duty. And the duty to respect or "tolerate" the lawful uses to which one's fellow citizens discharge their private property rights is nothing more or less than the duty to refrain from employing coercion — either directly (and, thus, unlawfully) or indirectly, through the government — against them.

Yet these considerations aside, the fact of the matter is that few if any of the opponents of the "Ground Zero" mosque favor the use of coercion. They seek, merely, to elicit from the parties to this transaction and their supporters both an awareness of and sympathy for the sensibilities of over two-thirds of the American population who are outraged by this proposed mosque. But whether their pleas have been made to the controversial Imam who is the purchaser of this property, or to President Obama, that they have thus far fallen on deaf ears only compounds their indignation and, in turn, strengthens their suspicion that, far from being the offspring of a desire on the part of Muslims to reconcile Islam with its host culture, the "Ground Zero" mosque is intended by its proponents to serve as a profound symbol of the victory of "the Religion of Peace" over its Western enemy.

Yet regardless of which if any of these two readings of this issue are correct, what's relevant is that the Imam's decision to build on "Ground Zero" has succeeded in achieving exactly the opposite effect of that which he ostensibly desired. Scores of Americans who lost loved ones on 9/11 have had salt rubbed in their wounds. Millions more — indeed, the vast majority of the country — whose lives were forever altered on that fateful Tuesday morning just nine years ago likewise feel like victims of the most gratuitous cruelty. At least two things, then, are painstakingly clear.

First, the mosque has proven itself to be a positively ruinous idea. Second, whatever the motives informing the desire for the mosque, they haven't anything at all to do with facilitating reconciliation and "healing."

In my next essay, I plan on probing deeper into this issue so as to reveal what I take to be the insights that it yields concerning Islam, the West, and the Left that, to my knowledge, have not yet been articulated.