“Ground Zero is a graveyard,” writes Rabbi David Wolpe in the Washington Post‘s On Faith section. “Yes, it is a national site and a place of competing interests, and a reminder of a peril facing our country and the world. But it is also a place where many people died and left no remains to be buried elsewhere. And just as a military cemetery is marked, in the poet’s words, by ‘crosses row on row’ so should a cross stand at this sacred place.
“The objections are more petulant than principled. As I argued with my cohort on ABC’s ‘the God Squad,’ Father Edward Beck, this is about commemoration and a declaration of who we are as a nation. Religious symbols are indeed part of our national identity. Barring them from this place which bears national significance is doing violence to our history and character.
“We are not only Christian, to be sure. There will be other religious markers there, as there should be. The desire to have a cross is about anguish and hope, not imperialism. Those who find religion essentially objectionable will object to this as well. But that disgruntled minority should not dictate policy. 9/11 families have come out in favor of the cross. The nuisance suits of those who would scrub transcendence from our landscape deserve dismissal.”
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