Baptism by torture

By now, you've heard that Sarah Palin likens waterboarding to baptism for accused terrorists.

Baptism.

A sacrament.

Compared to torture.

Rob Dreher speaks out:

OK, stop. Not only is this woman, putatively a Christian, praising torture, but she is comparing it to a holy sacrament of the Christian faith. It’s disgusting — but even more disgusting, those NRA members, many of whom are no doubt Christians, cheered wildly for her.... 

If I thought that kind of hateful declaration and abuse of the Christian religion was what conservatism stood for, I wouldn’t be able to call myself a conservative. Some conservatives do stand for that. They’re wrong, and they should be called out on it — not because some liberal somewhere is going to be offended, but first and foremost because we Christians who identify as conservatives are appalled by it. 

Joe Carter:

For anyone to confess Christ as their savior and to compare one of the means of God's grace to a reprehensible act of torture is reprehensible. I hope members of Gov. Palin's local church will explain to her why her remarks denigrate the Christian faith. Such remarks bring shame on the Body of Christ and to our witness in the world. Even more shameful, however, is the fact that so many Christians would cheer her support of torture (and yes, waterboarding is torture).....

.... The truly Christian position is to never forget that evil comes not just from the actions of "terrorists" or "enemies" but from the heart of a fallen, sacred yet degraded, human beings. If we are to preserve our own humanity we must not forget that our enemy differs from us in degree, not in kind. Like us, our enemies need to accept Jesus and to be baptized by water and the Spirit. That is the Christian way, not as Palin would have it, to have our enemies fear a pagan god and have their spirit broken by water.

Andrew Sullivan looks at what drives "Christian" outrage:

It seems to me, moreover, that torture is a far graver evil, even for orthodox theologians, than non-procreative or non-marital sex. And yet today’s Christianists are obsessed about the latter and not just indifferent to the former, but actually in favor of it. It’s this twisted set of priorities, this exquisitely misplaced set of fears, and this utter ignorance of even basic Christian teaching that reveals all that’s so terribly wrong with American Christianity. It has become its own nemesis.

What has happened to us?

In Davis, CA, university police stepped into a circle of students who were sitting in passive civil disobedience and began pepper spraying them. The police were not threatened, but committing an act of deliberate violence. Some reports have said that as students covered their eyes and mouths with clothing, the police pulled that clothing away and sprayed the chemical directly into their throats.

Look at this photograph, of the calm policeman who walked down the line, spraying each student, and then walked back and continued spraying.  As one would spray bugs in the house.  Utter and total disdain.

  James Fallows:

Watch that first minute and think how we'd react if we saw it coming from some riot-control unit in China, or in Syria. The calm of the officer who walks up and in a leisurely way pepper-sprays unarmed and passive people right in the face? We'd think: this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population. That's what I think here.

At least 50 years ago, they didn't have pepperspray. Then, they used firehoses.

This is America?

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.

Uganda bans female genital mutilation

CNN reports on an amazing piece of good news from Uganda:

The Ugandan parliament unanimously passed a bill banning female genital mutilation, a traditional rite that has sparked an international outcry and is practiced in some African and Asian communities.
The practice, which involves cutting off a girl's clitoris, is also called female circumcision. In some communities in eastern Uganda, it is practiced in girls up to age 15.
Convicted offenders face 10 years in prison, but if the girl dies during the act, those involved will get a life sentence, according to officials in the east African country.
"A majority of Ugandans felt it is a disgusting act, but you have to remember that this is a cultural belief that has been practiced for generations," said Fred Opolot, the government spokesman. "That's what took the bill so long to pass."
Human rights activists have decried the practice, which they say poses major health risks for girls and may lead to death. It also causes complications during sex and child birth, activists say.

More on the bad news from Uganda here and here.

A proposed anti-gay law could make Uganda perhaps the most dangerous place for homosexuals and drive the gays of Uganda further underground. In a rare interview, the first of its kind with a newspaper journalist, a lesbian told Saturday Monitor’s Rodney Muhumuza why she is very scared.

Torture a problem for Evangelicals

From the AP

Among evangelical leaders, debate over the use of harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists has prompted introspection about faith, ethics, the Golden Rule, just wars, Jack Bauer and Jesus.

A number of evangelical leaders have made opposition to torture without exceptions a moral cause over the past three years, part of a broadening of the movement's agenda beyond traditional culture war issues. Others in the movement, including many Christian right leaders, have largely resisted or stayed silent.....

The poll data from a survey of 742 U.S. adults released April 29 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found 62 percent of white evangelical Protestants said torture of a suspected terrorist could be often or sometimes justified to obtain important information. By contrast, 51 percent of white non-Hispanic Catholics, 46 percent of white mainline Protestants and 40 percent of the religiously unaffiliated held that position.....

"There is a version of Christianity in America that I think is not adequately committed to the Bible's teachings about the sacredness of every human life, including the lives of our enemies," Gushee [ a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University in Atlanta and president of Evangelicals for Human Rights] said. "It's also insufficiently committed to the peacemaking teachings of Jesus and the example of Jesus as one who did not resort to violence or cruelty to accomplish any of his goals and instead suffered violence instead of inflicting it."[emphasis mine]

Gary Bauer, a former Republican presidential candidate affiliated with several Christian right groups over the years, said the discussion should not come down to "Would Jesus torture?.... The more appropriate question is, 'What is a follower of Jesus permitted to do?'"

Bauer said the answer is "it depends" .

Words fail me. This is the greatest moral failing imaginable, and Bauer says "it depends."

Waterboarding Cheney

Pioneer Press in Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN, reports on Jesse Ventura's interview on Larry King Live.

Ventura said he was waterboarded as part of his Navy SEAL training. He was (typically) not shy about his views. "It's a good thing I'm not president," Ventura said. "I would prosecute every person involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it. I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law."

He went on: "I'll put it to you this way: you give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders."