Sometimes America's bubbling cauldron of resentments emits a poison that threatens to pollute good sense and the best of intentions. That such madness still haunts the planned Flight 93 Memorial in Somerset County is an unconscionable affront to the living and the dead.

If there's one thing that all Americans should rally behind it is the memorial that will honor the 40 men and women on Flight 93 who died near Shanksville. The United flight crashed in this field on Sept. 11, 2001, as ordinary people fought to regain control of the aircraft from the terrorist hijackers who were heading for the nation's capital.

This is ground hallowed by brave deeds that thwarted an evil plan. It requires a national memorial that reflects thoughtful, artistic, reverent and intelligent judgments. The plans went through just such a process of evaluation.

Moreover, they were changed to meet a ridiculous objection that the symbolism of the design was Islamic because it featured a crescent of maple trees. Obviously, this was not intended -- why would it be? --and the crescent isn't an exclusive symbol of Islam anyway, it's just a shape (New Orleans is "The Crescent City" and Americans have been seeing crescent moons for generations without thinking of the prophet). Despite the silliness of the objection, the designer willingly changed the arc to resemble almost a full circle.

That should have ended the controversy. Unfortunately, reason is no antidote to paranoid minds who think they are on to something. A blogger, Alec Rawls, who wrote a book titled "Crescent of Betrayal," has continued peddling other wild theories, such as the claim that the memorial faces Mecca when it is merely oriented to the crash site.

Personnel at the National Park Service, which will manage the memorial, easily refute such claims that in a reasonable world would remain undisturbed and unnoticed on the fringes of crackpot-dom. But as Post-Gazette staff writer Paula Reed Ward reported Saturday, a father of one of the people killed in the crash, Tom Burnett Sr., of Northfield, Minn., wants his son's name to be removed from the monument. This is a heartbreaking development. It is as if the irrationality of the terrorist attacks has been matched by the abandonment of old-fashioned American common sense at home.

The $57 million project is on track to open in 2011 -- and so it should, without a further thought to anyone who would turn it into a point of sour conjecture. No names should be removed -- they belong now to the ages. We owe the dead an intelligent and sane response to their sacrifice.

"United we stand" was the slogan in the days after 9/11. As one brave man said on United Flight 93, "Let's roll." Enough of those who would divide us for no good reason.