Torture Isn’t Actually Partisan

It takes a certain level of what Pope Francis calls “spiritual Alzheimers” for Christians to think torture is acceptable. In any circumstance.

I’m willing to give us some level of forgiveness for our confusion in the closing months of 2001, when the country, and particularly the government, was searching for ways to respond to the rise of al Qaeda. And I’ll even forgive that nasty time in 2003 when Abu Ghraib led us to question the dominant paradigm of the immorality of torture.

Notice, though, that we never questioned the dominant paradigm on torture. It just changed. Without our paying any attention. Actually, what we did was not prove that we should not transform the nature of our culture overnight without our consent. [Yes, we did commit a triple negative of indifference.] Our media allowed that paradigm to shift completely under our feet, turning us from a country that never condones any use of torture and the vanguard of prosecuting those who torture to…

what exactly?

A people who condone torture? Who encourage torture? Want torture as one of the tools in the toolbox? Who think any CIA agent is really Jack Bauer and at any moment there could be a ticking clock in which torture is the only option? That we define as normal and acceptable the most extreme and statistically impossible potentiality? That morality can be so easily thrown out the window?

Even stranger is that this happened so rapidly and completely that we had no idea of the proper order of things. As a country, we prosecuted torture. We criminalized torture. By our definition, and every pre 9-11 definition, waterboarding is torture.

Then a funny thing happened. We started torturing in secret. When it was exposed, we allowed the CIA, the Defense Department, and the White House to put the onus on its critics to prove why we shouldn’t torture. But that’s not how it works. Not when the normative behavior is that torture is illegal, immoral, and unethical. That is why the Torture Program’s defenders have spent such time trying to redefine and muddy the definition of torture in the law and culture. Because they had no defense to justify it.

And for the last decade, we’ve allowed the discussion around torture to seem like a partisan issue.

When taken with a whole host of other issues, treating these major moments of moral confusion as partisan disputes actually makes the conversation about what counts as partisan an exercise in hypocrisy and missing the point. Issues like the death of young African Americans and the militarization of police; the rising indebtedness of college students and the decrease in middle class jobs; the strange coincidence that we seem more interested in the criminal behaviors of the poor than of CEOs; and of course, the protecting of the religious liberty of employers at the expense of the liberty of their employees; they all seem partisan because our conservative and liberal friends seem to take different sides.

But who really wants the discrimination we live with? The racism, militarized police, the debt, the underemployment, the criminals in our neighborhoods and penthouses, and all of those ways in which tiny groups of people benefit to the exclusion, and suffering of others. These aren’t things any of us want. These things aren’t partisan.

We want peace. We don’t want torture. These aren’t partisan statements.

Unless you really want them to be. If that’s the case, then I know who I am. And it makes it even clearer who they are.

For Christians, “partisan” and “politics” are virtually never the point. The combination of our belief and our actions are. So we might put it this way:

Since our GOD is on the side of the poor and the prisoner and our savior is the most famous victim of fatal torture, known to all the world as the Prince of Peace, it is pretty obvious to everyone who the Christians really are.

And who they aren’t.

+++++

H/T goes to Mike Pesca, who showed the difference better than I have above and whose podcast, The Gist is required listening. His response to the response to the Torture Report should be widely heard and inwardly digested.

The segment on torture begins at about 24:35.

Be warned, there is some salty language in the interview portion of the podcast and difficult descriptions of torture in the last segment.