A pair of East Village residents are hoping their tiny, two-person protest campaign in favor of plans for an Islamic community center and mosque near the World Trade Center will help stem what they see as a rising tide of bigoted opposition.

Julia Lundy, 28, and her boyfriend, Matt Sky, 26, were sitting in their apartment earlier this week, growing increasingly angry as they watched the exhaustive national debate over the proposed center—at 45-47 Park Place in Lower Manhattan—unfold before them. After talking it over, the couple decided to take to the street outside the former Burlington Coat Factory where the Cordoba Initiative hopes to carry out its plans for the project they call Park51.

On Tuesday and Wednesday they stood there, waving signs that read “America Supports All Faiths” and “Support Freedom of Religion.” The couple says they intend to be there for up to 10 hours a day for the next several days in an effort to rally support for the project.

“The thing that really drove us here was to see it rise to the federal level,” said Lundy, referring to the blowback from President Barack Obama’s comments last week in support of the developers’ constitutional right to build their project. “We both had the time, and we felt this was too important.”

“People need to remember that it wasn’t all Muslims that attacked us on Sept. 11, it was terrorists who happened to be Muslim,” said Sky, a freelance web developer. “People who are offended by this are getting the two confused, and that’s a dangerous thing to do. That only feeds into what radicals want.”

After months of deflecting the topic as a local issue, Obama addressed the matter in some detail at a White House Ramadan celebration on Friday, unleashing a storm of anger from opponents of the Islamic center.

“As a citizen and as President, I believe Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else,” Obama said. “And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan.”

Lundy and Sky said they understand the opponents point of view—including dozens of family members of 9/11 victims—who have contested the center’s construction on the ground that it is insensitive to the memory of those who died.

“The problem is,” Lundy added, “if you say that it’s insensitive, it’s the same as equating Muslims with terrorists.”

On Wednesday afternoon, most people just passed the couple by, paying them and their signs little notice. But the reactions they do get, they said, are evenly split between the supportive and vitriolic. Sky, who works as a math tutor, said on their first day out a man had yanked the sign out of his hands and threw it under a parked truck.

“Mostly,” said Lundy, “we either get a thumbs-up or a middle finger.”

Soon, the couple hopes, they will no longer stand alone in their vigil.

“Anybody who advocates for freedom of religion should be out here,” said Sky.