The issue of whether a mosque should be built near Ground Zero in New York City was never so much a question of whether Muslims could do it, but whether they should do it and whether the location was appropriate.
The First Amendment virtually guarantees that if you want to build a place of worship, no one can stop you based on your religious beliefs.
I was both shocked and amused, then, to read the story published earlier this month about a woman who is leading a charge to outlaw mosques in Bella Vista.
Yes, you read that correctly. She believes that mosques are training grounds for terrorism rather than houses of worship, and she wants them banned.
As a fan of The Onion, America's finest source for satirical news, I've come to expect headlines such as "Resident says 'no' to mosques inside the city" from that publication.
But that headline actually came from Bella Vista's own newspaper, The Weekly Vista, and I have never known Vista editor Doug Grant to manufacture the news, even for laughs.
The woman behind this anti-mosque drive is real estate agent Kay Strickland. She has asked City Council to plan a meeting where they can discuss her idea. Seriously.
"As you know, Americans are in dire circumstances," Strickland wrote in a letter to the council. "There's an attempt to ignore our Constitution and other actions indicating that we the people must take as much preemptive action as we possibly can."
"Preemptive" is the key word here. There are no mosques in Bella Vista, nor are there any known plans to build one there.
Strickland is not alone in her push. Retired U.S. Marine Corps Col. Billy R. Duncan, who is affiliated with a website called Veterans Against Jihadism (www.vajonline.org), said he is "trying to get the mayors in this area on board" with the idea, implying that Bella Vista's council won't be the only one confronting this issue.
Bella Vista Mayor Frank Anderson told me last week that he has been receiving "two or three e-mails a day" from Strickland and a couple of other people talking up the mosque matter. He didn't sound at all enthusiastic about the idea, though he didn't completely reject it, either.
"They would like to present their picture of the world to council," Anderson said. "I will probably offer them a chance to do that to any council members who want to hear that."
He added that he finds it difficult to believe it's legal to prohibit purchase of property for legal reasons. "They seem to think there's some kind of law that supports that," he said.
A question to Strickland and others of her mindset: Even if a law banning mosques in your city could survive a legal challenge, what's next? If you deny mosques, you must implicitly deny Muslims. Will you then roll out a religion test for all prospective residents?
Imagine a real estate agent putting the final touches on a big sale, then pushing one final document across the table at the customer. "Just need you to sign this saying you're not a terrorist or a Muslim," she'd say.
Just to be safe, you better ban all non-white people from the city, and erect a wall around the city just to make sure they don't sneak in.
By the way, did you know there are two mosques in Northwest Arkansas -- one in Bentonville and one in Fayetteville? To my knowledge there have been no incidents of terrorism attributed to their presence. Perhaps Strickland and Duncan would learn something from visiting those mosques.
Edward E. Curtis, author of the book "Muslims in America," wrote in an article last month for The Washington Post that there are more than 2,000 places of Muslim prayer -- most of them mosques -- in the United States. And how much terrorism have they spawned?
Curtis also wrote that most U.S. mosques, besides holding worship services, "hold weekend classes for children, offer charity to the poor, provide counseling services and conduct interfaith programs" -- just like any other religious institution in America.
Undoubtedly, there are radical Muslims in America, but we're letting paranoia get the best of us if we rush to the obviously false assumption that all Muslims are from the same mold as those 9/11 hijackers. McCarthyism is no better for us in the 21st century than it was in the 20th.
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DAVE PEROZEK IS AN EDITORIAL WRITER FOR THE BENTON COUNTY DAILY RECORD.