Standing up to terrorism as Christians and Americans

San Diego is a border town, a city of refugees and immigrants not just from Mexico and the Pacific, but from Africa and Europe. The Bishop of San Diego, Rt Rev James Mathes, speaks out :

As a nation of immigrants and refugees (over 40 percent of us can track our ancestry through Ellis Island), we must not be changed by terrorists. If because of ISIS, we pass laws restricting refugees, if we impede compassion, if we impinge civil liberties like after 9/11, then ISIS will win. Now is the time for our nation to rally around her core values so eloquently stated in our first piece of American scripture, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These immortal words echo holy words from the apostle, Paul, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus," (Galatians 3:28).

This is who we are as a Christian people. This is who we are as citizens of the United States. We take risks for those who suffer. We are descendants of the Good Samaritan and Martin of Tours, Francis of Assisi, and Mother Teresa. Our fathers and mothers gave to the Red Cross, created the Marshall Plan, rebuilt Europe, adopted orphans from war torn countries, helped rebuild New Orleans, and we will be there when tragedy strikes again. Now is the time for us to be touched by the better angels of our nature. Now is the time to remember who and whose we are. Now it is time to love and not fear. That is the only thing that will heal our broken world.

Read the whole thing.

Torturing Children

From the NY Times:

Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, a round-faced 13-year-old boy, was arrested at a protest in Jiza, a southern Syrian village near Dara’a, on April 29. Nothing was known of him for a month before his mutilated corpse was returned to his family on the condition, according to activists, that they never speak of his brutal end.

But the remains themselves testify all too clearly to ghastly torture. Video posted online shows his battered, purple face. His skin is scrawled with cuts, gashes, deep burns and bullet wounds that would probably have injured but not killed. His jaw and kneecaps are shattered, according to an unidentified narrator, and his penis chopped off.

From John Yoo, during a 2005 debate on presidential powers:

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that. Not, Oh my God, no we would never injure an innocent child. In John Yoo's world, it's a reasonable question, that a President might think "he needs to do that."

And the right wingers (despite their claims to support freedom) see nothing wrong with torture. And we have corrupted our youth as well, in a horrifying way, according to a recent study by the Red Cross:

[A] surprising majority—almost 60 percent—of American teenagers thought things like water-boarding or sleep deprivation are sometimes acceptable. More than half also approved of killing captured enemies in cases where the enemy had killed Americans. When asked about the reverse, 41 percent thought it was permissible for American troops to be tortured overseas. In all cases, young people showed themselves to be significantly more in favor of torture than older adults.
...

“I think it suggests the national conscious is becoming more and more corroded and more accustomed to the violation of fundamental principles of human rights and international law,” says Lawrence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, who blames programs like 24 that trivialize serious issues. ...

... the generational tip-toe back from humanitarian legal norms may say more about a nation increasingly removed from the costs of war. “For young people,” says Harvard’s Tribe, “to put themselves in place of a soldier is a level of empathy that most people simply don’t have anymore.”

Apparently, we are Syria.

Liberty weeps.