Torture? No, just "conditioning for subsequent interviews"

Torture is wrong no matter you call it in Newspeak. The magazine what Billy Graham founded sums it all up for us:

5 Reasons Torture is always Wrong - Christianity Today Magazine

Long ago, German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote about the perennial human tendency to find exceptions to moral rules when the rules bind a bit too tightly on us: "Hence there arises a natural … disposition to argue against these strict laws of duty and to question their validity, or at least their purity and strictness, and, if possible, to make them more accordant with our wishes and inclinations, that is to say, to corrupt them at their very source, and to entirely destroy their worth."

I believe this is the best explanation for what is happening with the issue of torture in our nation. We are tempted to follow the logic of a July 11, 2005, Time magazine cover story that said, "In the war on terrorism, the personal dignity of a fanatic trained for mass murder may be an inevitable casualty."

Yet we are queasy enough about this "inevitable casualty" that we do not want to call torture what it is. We do not want to expose our policies, our prisons, or our prisoners to public view. We deny that we are torturing, or we deny that our prisoners are really prisoners. When pushed against the wall, we remind one another how evil the enemy is. We give every evidence of the kind of self-deception that is characteristic of a descent into sin.

It is past time for evangelical Christians to remind our government and our society of perennial moral values, which also happen to be international and domestic laws. As Christians, we care about moral values, and we vote on the basis of such values. We care deeply about human-rights violations around the world. Now it is time to raise our voice and say an unequivocal no to torture, a practice that has no place in our society and violates our most cherished moral convictions.

David P. Gushee is professor of moral philosophy at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, and author of Only Human: Christian Reflections on the Journey Toward Wholeness (Jossey-Bass, 2005). A longer version of this essay can be accessed at www.davidgushee.com.

Thanks to TalkLeft for the link.

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