As followup to Patrick Madrid’s condemnation of waterboarding, and my post (yep, shameless plug time!) about the flawed reasoning of those who claim that it is somehow more acceptable to be pro-torture than it is to be pro-abortion, I’d recommend reading Mark Shea’s excellent post on the topic. As is often the case, he gets the point across in a way that few others are able. The key passage is below the fold; emphases are mine:
I got tired of wading through such cesspools of filth trying to palm itself off as “Catholic moral reasoning” and decided to be pro-active. Here’s what I did. Instead of falling prey to the dictionary game, where you offer definition after definition and the interlocutor dismisses definition after definition while never offering a definition of his own, the trick is to assert the Church’s positive teaching. That is, instead of letting the moral equivalent of the adulterer wannabe force me on the debating ground of his faux confusion over how close you can get to the hot secretary without it technically precisely being, you know, adultery, I realized that what the defender of Catholic teaching needs to do is emphasize “avoidance of the near occasion of sin”.
So, for instance, when you live in a country (as we do) with regime of legalized torture in which over a hundred detainees have been murdered in cold blood, the question is not “How close can you get to torturing somebody in a ticking time bomb scenario?”
Rather, the question is, “Is it a grave sin for Catholics to make excuses for torture via non-existent ticking time bomb scenarios when the State is currently enacting a consequential program of torture and murder, including threats to murder children and rape innocent women?” I think the case can be made that it is, just as the case can be made that if a famous Catholic goes on TV to speculate repeatedly and publicly about how often an act of killing a fetus might not technically be abortion, he is guilty of giving grave scandal and of leading people into grave sin.
A follow up question is this: “What part of “humanely” is not clear in the Church’s teaching that “Non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely” (CCC 2313). If the reply comes “But this is an enemy like no other!” ask the interlocutor, “So our fathers who fought Nazis and Communists were up against cupcakes and only we Baby Boomers know what it is to fight real evil?”
The fact is, we’ve gotten lots of good intelligence over the decades while observing the Geneva Conventions. What we’ve gotten over the past decade since the US gov’t started torturing under Bush (and is now continuing the policies under Obama) is international disgrace *and* lousy intel, plus the side benefit of junk “evidence” that is not admissible in court because it was obtained by torture. Talk about sin making us stupid!
And finally, what the “prolife” Right has gotten by its cowardly embrace of torture is this: the loss of the only thing it had to stand on in it’s fight against abortion. Because once we embrace consequentialism and the notion that good ends justify evil means, what do we have left to say to the abortionist, who holds exactly the same philosophy? Catholics must repent of this monstrous moral theory or they can have nothing whatever to say to the abortionist who replies, “You want to live a long, happy and fruitful life and don’t much care if you commit what some abstract theologian calls “grave sin”in order to get it? So does my client and so do I. So leave us alone.”
Precisely. Unfortunately, I think that the Catholic Right in America will continue to give about as much respect to Holy Mother Church’s condemnation of torture as the Catholic Left does to her condemnation of abortion and euthanasia. I believe it was Aquinas who said that it doesn’t matter whether you fall off the boat on the left or the right side; either way, you still drown.
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