Firefighters from Brooklyn’s Red Hook station arrived at the Twin Towers before the second plane hit on 9/11. All seven men of Ladder 101 lost their lives that day. This summer, the city renamed part of a neighborhood street in their honor.
But the new name, Seven in Heaven Way, isn’t to everyone’s liking.
Atheist groups have protested the public allusion to religion. “The attacks on 9/11 were an attack on America,” David Silverman, president of American Atheists, told the Brooklyn Paper. “They were an attack on our Constitution, and breaking that Constitution to honor these firefighters is the wrong thing to do.”
What’s wrong, actually, is this kind of sweeping intolerance toward Brooklyn residents expressing the sentiment that seven neighbors made the ultimate sacrifice on their behalf. This is no time for confusion over the meaning of religious freedom.
Considering the threat of terrorism and America’s appeals for Muslim societies to reject Islamist extremism and embrace freedom, it’s important we understand the nature of our own liberty.
Godless secularism – or a “naked public square” denuded of all religious references and symbols, as the late Richard John Neuhaus put it – never was intended to be the character of our American republic. Religious freedom, the cornerstone of all freedom, is freedom for religion, not hostility toward it.
Tags: 9/11, atheist groups, freedom for religion, Jennifer A. Marshall, moral responsibility, religious liberty
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