All posts tagged "Ground Zero"

President Barack Obama inaugurates Thursday a museum commemorating the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the culmination of three years of delays, controversy and financial woes as he opens a memorial to an event that changed America.

As the debate has endlessly worn on about the Park 51 Islamic community center, two things have become abundantly clear. The first is that much of our discourse in this country is fundamentally driven by a strain of Islamophobia tempered only by the fact that overt displays of violence are likely to end up on YouTube. The second is that the people seeking to protect Ground Zero have no fucking idea what the World Trade Center was, what Ground Zero is, where it is, how it's perceived, or, likely, what the words "Ground" and "Zero" mean.

[rebelmouse-image 24749640 original_size="500x375" expand=1]Since Muslims have decided to piss off conservatives by being Muslim on American soil, the inevitable response has finally come: an extended gay joke.

Manhattan is a place where millions of people live. They work there, they date there, they eat there, they get married there, they raise children there - and they worship there. This is not the function of meat-eaters trying to stick it to vegetarians (and vice versa), or fertile people flaunting their properly functioning reproductive systems to the infertile. It is the function of people living in a place and participating in the things that people do as functional human beings.