All posts tagged "Cordoba House"

For some reason, Jesse's excellent post mocking a bunch of wingnuts for their "brilliant" plan to build a gay bar by the Cordoba House has brought a shitstorm of illiterate Twitter rantings at me from the sexually repressed and those lacking self-awareness or reading comprehension. You know, even though I didn't write it. Their urge to gang up on a lady will not be thwarted by the fact that it wasn't a she that called them out so much that they have nothing left to do but rave like lunatics.

I'm a relatively recent transplant to New York City, as you probably know, but I have to say that this entire fuss over the Cordoba House has left me pretty annoyed. One the things you figure out quickly from living in New York is that people from all sorts of backgrounds live right on top of each other here, share the same facilities and public spaces, and that this is a pretty awesome thing indeed. Not that there isn't diversity all over the country, but New York is especially diverse and relatively peaceful. As some friends of mine noted when they came to visit, they took the subways all the way from JFK to Park Slope and didn't hear one other conversation in English. I haven't even been here a year, but I'm impressed with what a great example New York is of how to (mostly) live in a super-diverse community and get along just fine, thank you very much. I'm not a pollyanna---I'm aware that people can harbor all sorts of crazy racism about each other even if they do see members of the hated group go about their boring ass every day business just like everyone else---but that's why it seems doubly important to me not to sow animosity where none existed before.