The controversy still rages over the plan to build an Islamic cultural center, including a mosque, in a building damaged by the 9-11 attacks.

This past week, cable news and talk radio played a recording of the project’s sponsor, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, in which he states that the US has more innocent Muslim blood on its hands than Al Quaeda has innocent non-Muslim blood on its hands. The statement was met with shock and outrage. How could the Imam claim that America is responsible for killing innocents? The victims on 9-11, as well as others throughout the world, were innocents, non-combatants, unwary bystanders deliberately and brutally murdered in an instant conflagration of impact, explosion and jet fuel. Others have died in a hail of nails, flack and stones at high velocity from a desperate and often deluded suicide bomber.

Imam Feisal was wrong, and right at the same time. He was wrong because he claimed that 500,000 children died as a result of US sanctions against Iran and Iraq. He claimed the UN had proof. Those numbers seem exaggerated, but I cannot prove that, just a hunch. Nevertheless, there is no moral equivalency between the mass murders of 9-11 and deaths that inadvertently resulted from measures designed to bring an end to a dictatorship’s threats to world peace and repression of its own citizens, including children. It is always a tragedy when innocents die, but the intention of the sanctions was not to kill children, it was to protect innocents. If the sanctions were a failure, that does not retroactively transform an effort to protect life into an act of murder. Therefore, the Imam was wrong.

But when the Imam said that the US has more innocent blood on its hands than Al Qiada has on its, he was tragically, regretfully, and even shockingly, right. The US allows, funds and even encourages by law what no Muslim country does – the deliberate and brutal killing of her own innocent children before, during and after birth. Not only is this reprehensible crime against human life permitted, it is promoted by politicians and courts as a necessary component of the economy. The most innocent, vulnerable and promising members of the community are regularly poisoned, burned, decapitated and suffocated inside and outside the womb. After they’re dead, and sometimes before, they are cut to pieces and sent down the garbage disposal. Even though many are given a death certificate, they’re routinely denied burial. This happens about 3,700 times a day in the USA. In addition, abortion injuries to women, sometimes causing their deaths, go unreported and are not prosecuted.

I know Imam Feisal, I have traveled in Muslim countries and I have spoken with Muslim people here and there. Abortion (forbidden by Muslim law for all but a threat to the mothers life), as well as our open practice of sexual abuse and disregard for modesty and chastity, scares them. Ancient cultures know there are dire consequences for sexual irresponsibility – abortion, sexual disease, and the suffering that results from adultery etc, is a real threat to common folk struggling to care for their families. The US foists a disregard for marriage and sexual irresponsibility on traditional cultures around the world by funding abortion promoters like planned parenthood. That threatens traditional cultures and lives.

So I’m sorry to say that my friend, Imam Feisal was wrong and right. Wrong – the sanctions were not designed to kill Muslim children, right, the US has more innocent blood on its hands than Al Quaeda.

There is a lot of controversy on the Hill and in state capitals about alleged obstructionist politics. Its no surprise that partisan politics is notoriously obstructionist. Like a ball game, when one teams objective is to get the ball across the goal line – the other team’s objective is to obstruct their progress. Voila! Party politics.

The problem with political obstructionism is that it has real consequences for people’s lives: this is true whether it is the party trying to get the bill passed, or the party blocking it. Whether the effect is good or bad depends on what the content of the legislation is.

When it comes to good and evil it is a far, far more serious matter. When an intrinsically evil action is being advanced, then it becomes the moral obligation of those who know and recognize it to be evil, to block its progress.

This was vividly displayed when Pro-Life Democrats in the House of Representatives successfully blocked the forward movement of health care legislation that would have permitted government sponsorship of abortion. That any government, which principal responsibility is to protect its citizens, attempts rather to kill or harm those citizens, that action must be impeded and ultimately stopped.

Whether or not those Democrats will be ultimately succesful remains to be seen, but Rep,. Stupak and others with him have done what emmbers of the government are supposed to do. In other words, they had a moral obligation to be obstructionist.

Throughout salvation history we see heroic acts of obstructionism. Moses obstructed Pharaoh’s progress toward destroying God’s people. Mordecai obstructed Haman’s intentions to commit genocide against the Jews. John the Baptist obstructed Herod’s evil machinations and our Lord Jesus obstructed Satan’s evil designs for the condemnation of the world!

So, obstructionism is not always bad – after all, more than half the world mobilized to obstruct Adolph Hitler’s advance on Europe. And we must obstruct Satan’s purpose to pervert human society and build a culture of death.

St. Augustine so aptly described evil as the absence of good. Evil advances when good people do nothing. That makes obstructionism a good thing.