Sarah Palin is doubling down on bigotry, with yet another Facebook post that brushes aside minor issues like tolerance and openness to get to what she really wants to say: Muslims shouldn’t have the same constitutional rights as other Americans. Sarah Palin: An Intolerable Mistake on Hallowed Ground | Facebook.

Earlier today, Mayor Bloomberg responded to my comments about the planned mosque at Ground Zero by suggesting that a decision not to allow the building of a mosque at that sacred place would somehow violate American principles of tolerance and openness.

Right. Well, we’re about to see how much those principles matter to Palin:

No one is disputing that America stands for – and should stand for – religious tolerance. It is a foundation of our republic. This is not an issue of religious tolerance but of common moral sense. To build a mosque at Ground Zero is a stab in the heart of the families of the innocent victims of those horrific attacks.

Wait a minute. I thought it was supposed to be the left that exalts feelings above everything else. Yet here’s Sarah Palin, heroine of the right wing, saying that people’s feelings take precedence over religious tolerance, openness, and the Constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom of religion.

And believe it or not, there are families of 9/11 victims who are not opposed to the community center two blocks from Ground Zero (it’s not “at” Ground Zero, no matter how many times Palin repeats that lie). Sarah Palin takes it on herself to speak for all of these families, but she has no moral right to do so.

When the World Trade Center was attacked and destroyed by Al Qaeda, some of the innocent victims that day were also Muslims. But in Palin’s netherworld of fear and hate, they simply don’t count.

Her first post about this, using the non-word “refudiate,” got a lot of attention because of its utter stupidity. But the much more important point about this Palin position is that she is openly coming out as an anti-Muslim bigot of the worst kind. She’s not simply opposed to radical Islamists, which any decent person would and should be. She’s opposed to Islam itself, and Muslims themselves.

Here you have the modern right wing in a nutshell. Fear and bigotry trumps everything else — the Constitution, the rule of law, religious freedom, everything.