Catholic and Enjoying It!
“Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not did we not kill police officers and bomb government buildings and poison water supplies in Your name?” And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers.’ And they will say, “Ah crap! I thought that by killing the very people who were in charge of making the country safe was doing Your will. So all those verses telling us to love our enemies and treat others better than ourselves and obeying the laws of the Government didn’t mean destroy the Government? Who knew?”
HT:Thesauros
Meanwhile, Rod Dreher points to a problem for all of our ingenious torture apologist friends when he (tongue-in-cheek) demands the waterboarding of these merry band of lunatics.
For, of course, the obvious question, given the premises of people like Marc Thiessen and the rest of the enthusiasts for enhanced interrogation is “Why not?” Charles Krauthammer has already instructed us that if we have the slightest belief that we can save one innocent life then it’s a moral obligation to torture people for life-saving info. And yet the Rubber Hose Right has been strangely silent about torturing Good White Christian folk from America, even though we have seen a 300% rise in nutty militia groups with various apocalyptic scenarios firing their imaginations. So: if there’s even a *chance* that this little group of nutjobs knows of *other* little nutjob groups and individuals who think like they do, why aren’t the Torture Enthusiasts saying “I’d rather be waterboarding?” I mean, it’s not even torture, right?
Here’s the thing: sooner or later, some dystopian bureaucrat is going to actually have the courage of the Rubber Hose Right’s convictions, only he will not sully it with the racism that currently keeps Torture Enthusiast imaginations focused only on torturing swarthy Arab bad guys from Central Casting. He will follow the logic of the Torture Enthuasiasts to its conclusion and say, “Anybody I regard as a threat to the security of the State should be tortured.” This will include Good White Christian folk. Some of them might even be guilty of something. But, of course, states that torture can always find you guilty of something even if you aren’t–as wew have already shown in our treatment of swarthy Arab from Central Casting Maher Arar. Soon, if the Rubber Hose Right gets its way and the Cheneys and Thiessens and their acolytes are returned to power, we will be well on the way to establishing a state which will be happy to expand the torture regime to all manner of suspected troublemakers. Once you accept the premise that torture is legitimate if you think it might save a life, there’s no reason whatsoever not to inflict it in *every* situation it might do so. If you happen to torture somebody who is innocent, you can always hide the problem.
Ideas have consequences.
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