How can a follower of Jesus the Christ believe that some people just need water boarding?
Mr. Santorum, I am speaking to you.
In the play I recently saw, The Circumference of a Squirrel, the protagonist, reflecting on an incident from his childhood, where his father led him and his brother in the brutal killing of a squirrel in the house, he says that for the first time, “I understood the difference between the executioner and the torturer,” referring to his father’s jubilation at the chasing, cornering, and bashing to death of the hapless squirrel unlucky enough to have taken up residence in the family’s chimney.
Now can we finally talk about the national policy of torture? Now can we begin to understand that it has always been a fool’s errand to focus the national dialogue on efficacy rather than morality?
If the conversation is about what works, the efficacy of torture matters. Ultimately, however, efficacy is beside the point.
The point is that torture is wrong. Morally wrong. Even when it works.
In the case of the location and killing of Osama bin Laden, maybe torture worked. Maybe it did not.
But that is beside the point.
For a person of faith, isn’t the locus of the conversation on what we should do rather than on what we can do?
Thus I am still asking, still wanting, Mr. Santorum, or someone, or anyone, to explain to me how a follower of Jesus the Christ becomes an advocate for torture?
I really want to know.
I want to know how a thinking faithful fellow Christian comes to the conclusion that some people need or require water boarding and all the other tools in the torturer’s kit. I know how the Inquisition came to its conclusions. But how do you? What biblical text do you refer to? What teaching of Christ do you rely upon? What doctrine or maxim of your faith underpins your beliefs as to torture? What Christian teaching leads you to the unspoken premise that the greater good for the many requires the disregard of the humanity of the one? What do you do with the fact that the man you follow was himself a victim of torture by the state? Or that the cultural and religious leaders of his own time believed they were acting for the greater good?
I do not claim that there are no answers to these questions. I simply do not know what they are. And I want to.
Please, won’t you tell me.
