Top Democratic leaders offered no real defense of the Park51 center

Evidence

Democratic Party politicians took positions that ranged from neutral to blatantly hostile. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked about the opposition funders, a tepid response. The following day she added that the location of the project was a “local decision” and that freedom of religion was a constitutional right. Within the context of this national controversy, this would turn out to be the most positive response from a Democratic Party official: a rather lukewarm defense of the constitution rather than a denunciation of the new McCarthyites and their overt racism. Pelosi’s counterpart in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid, didn’t offer even a tepid defense but spoke out against the project. He argued that while the First Amendment protects freedom of religion, he believed that the “mosque should be built someplace else.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 660

Categorization

• XREF: Supplies concrete governing-elite evidence for the claim that Islamophobia is bipartisan state practice; useful against readings that reduce it to the Far Right.