Annette John-Hall: What does ground zero mosque flap say about tolerance?

That heavy sigh you hear is me almost wishing President Obama hadn't weighed in on a Muslim group's decision to build an Islamic center near the site of the 9/11 attacks.

After all, I'm weary of the sickening practice some folks have of turning everything the president says into a political stink bomb. But I also welcome a truthful conversation about liberty, a right we claim to cherish so much.

Funny how critics like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich equate the Muslims who want to pray with the terrorists who want to destroy.

During a White House dinner over the weekend marking the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, the president said he supports the construction of an Islamic complex (which, by the way, would include a spa, a basketball court, prayer space, and, yes, a 9/11 memorial for the whole community) two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center.

"Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in the country," Obama said. " . . . This is America."

He's correct, of course. Religious freedom stands as a fundamental right in our nation's patchwork of liberties. It's called the Constitution.

Historically, the right to religion has always been hard won. Puritans in Massachusetts persecuted Quakers, causing them to flee to Philadelphia. Laws barred Catholics from pursuing certain professions or inheriting or purchasing land.

And here in Philadelphia, officials at St. George's Methodist Church prevented two African American worshipers - Richard Allen and Absalom Jones - from praying at the altar. But no one stopped them from creating the first African Methodist Episcopal denomination, and Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church in 1816.

Thank God. Because it's the denomination I grew up in.

"The church was always the basis of the debate for our ideas about citizenship and identity," says Richard Newman, historian and author of Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the A.M.E. Church, and the Black Founding Fathers.

When it comes to the proposed mosque around the corner from ground zero, the question we need to ask is "What does religious liberty mean?" Newman says. "Is it religious liberty, or a certain type of religious liberty - like white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant religious liberty?"

Like all Americans, I understand that the tragic events of 9/11 continue to cause pain, especially for those who lost loved ones.

Robert McIlvaine still struggles and probably always will. When the subject of his son, Bobby, comes up, McIlvaine asks that I give him a minute so he can compose himself.

Bobby McIlvaine, a Princeton graduate and aspiring writer who worked in media relations for Merrill Lynch, was on his way up to the 106th floor of the World Trade Center for a seminar that September morning when the plane hit. He never made it there. He was only 26.

Once the elder McIlvaine starts talking about the mosque controversy, sadness gives way to anger. How can people shred the Constitution to justify their biases?

"Nobody's asked me, and there are plenty of 9/11 families who feel the way I do," says McIlvaine, 65, a retired teacher who lives in Oreland.

When he first heard of the proposed Islamic center, he had no problem. "I didn't give it a second thought," he said. "And if you knew my son, you'd know he'd be rolling over in his grave over this."

As would the American Muslims who also died on that day.

"It's a sin what [fearmongers] are doing, making this about politics at the families' expense," McIlvaine adds. "It's producing hate, and it's the last thing this country needs right now."

Yet backlash continues over proposed mosques in such states as California, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Illinois. It's all making me wonder what we're truly embracing here. The liberties that our forefathers held so dear?

Or fear?