DIFFERENT people have different visions of what America is all about. For example, each time I re-enter the United States, as I did last week at JFK Airport in New York ("Where America Welcomes the World"), I get into a taxi and ride up the Van Wyck to the Long Island Expressway, noting the succession of a Muslim mosque, community centre and school; St. Mary's church in downtown Brooklyn; and the immense Jewish cemetery overlooking Manhattan's skyscrapers, where my grandfather is buried. To me, this is America: religiously, ethnically and racially pluralistic and tolerant. To other people, however, America means something different. Back in December, when plans were first announced to build a Muslim community centre and mosque two blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center, one commenter at WorldNetDaily wrote , "If this is true, our beloved country is already gone. We no longer have the America I know and love." Obviously, you can always find somebody on the internet to say anything, but those comments in December have been followed by a rising crescendo of conservative opposition to the mosque project, as TalkingPointsMemo documented in late May. And, last week, Sarah Palin chimed in from someplace in "the heartland" with her own lexicologically-inventive contribution to the debate.

A lot of things have happened in America over the past ten years that, in 2000, I never would have believed could happen in America. Ten years ago, I would have thought that someone who expressed open intolerance towards any religion would be excluded from the political mainstream. It continues to amaze me that Americans would seek to deny permission to build a religious establishment in a given location due to the particular faith practised in that religious establishment. I thought that sort of dominance of politics over freedom of conscience and creed had been refudiated in America long ago.

(Our Lexington columnist chimes in here. Photo credit: AFP)