JPod And Torture, II

He concedes that he was factually wrong:

It is true that the law speaks of the “threatened infliction” of “severe physical pain and suffering.” But this is an extraordinarily broad phrase that could indicate that a nine-year-old bully who terrifies another kid on the playground by threatening to rip his arm off is guilty of torture.

Such statute language does not clarify; it muddies, as legal language often muddies. If someone says, “I am going to kill you,” and by so doing causes fear in the person to whom he says it, is that torture? Clearly not, though the fear experienced by the person might be severe.

Actually: with a couple of preconditions, the answer to this last question is clearly yes. The legal language does not muddy. It only muddies if you are trying to find loopholes around torture rather than reading the clear and broad interdiction of such practices by officials of any government.

If a government representative has another person completely in his control and threatens him with being killed – what is known as a "mock execution" – yes, it would be regarded as torture, as a violation of the Geneva Conventions and thus illegal, and unconstitutional, and subject to war crime prosecution. If, for example, you are a government official or soldier, blindfold a prisoner, hold an unloaded gun at their temple, tell them you are going to shoot them, and then don’t, it’s still torture. They’re physically unharmed – but it’s a war crime nonetheless. It’s severe mental suffering, used to extract a confession (usually false). That’s the definition of torture. Ditto with waterboarding, where the terror of forcing someone to drown, simulating the moments before death, and then rescuing them at the last moment and repeating – is unequivocally an act of torture. It is such an act of torture that prisoners routinely beg for mercy and will tell you anything – including, of course, untruths – to stop it. And if it were done to an American soldier, JPod would call it torture, as the law clearly does. But we are supposed to believe the blog postings of Podhoretz over the convictions of John McCain on the matter. The pretension would be funny were it not so disgusting.

The truth is that the law and the Conventions were indeed written broadly and their language is sweeping. But it is not unclear. And it is the law. It is just that the authors of the law and the Conventions never dreamed that one day, the president of the United States would be attempting to evade the plain interdiction of torture under US law, and twisting the Constitution and the English language to do so. Nor would they ever have believed that a vice-president of the United States, when referring to such torture, would not even wrestle with any moral or legal questions but regard the matter as a "no-brainer", and toss the question off as if he were speaking of the weather.

But that is where we are.

Did Christianity Create Secularism?

I haven’t read Charles Taylor’s big new book, "A Secular Age," but I want to. There’s an interesting discussion of it over at a blog devoted entirely to the book, "The Immanent Frame," Robert Bellah makes the following point:

Taylor argues that the Reformation—with its radical rejection of the monastic life and the demand of a kind of monastic discipline for everyone—is just the preliminary culmination of a thousand years of pressure of Christianity toward Reform. He then shows how, even when Protestantism itself comes in question, long-term pressure toward Reform continues, first in 18th-century Deism and its attendant strong emphasis on Benevolence, and then in the 19th-century emergence of unqualified (secular) humanism with its emphasis on progress.

According to Taylor, it is not “science” or “Darwinism” that accounts for these developments, but the continuation of a moral narrative that was already long present in Christianity. Even the emergence in the late 19th century of anti-humanism (Nietzsche) cannot be understood except in terms of the particular features of what was being rejected: namely, both Christian and secular social ameliorism. By seeing the emergence of the secular age in narrative form primarily, rather than as a theoretical discovery, I think he makes the whole thing far more intelligible and explains our present quandaries far better than any competing accounts.

The Face Of America At The Border

My friend Dan Savage chimes in:

I feel for Bruce Bawer …but try coming back into the US from Europe with your partner and your adopted child.

DJ is, as you know, a quick kid. He spends a lot of time around adults, he’s not oblivious, he can read adults. And we go to Canada and/or Europe at least twice a year. I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve had passport and/or customs officials literally and audibly scoff when we tell them DJ is our son — you know, that "uusssggghhhh" sound people make when they’re told something they don’t believe or are offended by, a cross between groaning and clearing your throat.

We’ve had passport control officers roll their eyes, glare at us, look down at DJ and slowly shake their heads. And DJ understands everything — these people, these people in US government uniforms, think we did something wrong by adopting him. That there’s something illegitimate about his family.

The worst part, of course, is that we can’t say anything. We can’t defend ourselves or him or his family as we’re insulted and demeaned because God only knows what will happen if we get into an argument.

So you know what we’ve told him since he began to understand the scoffing and eye rolling and disgusted looks? That these people work for George W. Bush, and that George W. Bush doesn’t approve of gay families, and he hires assholes that feel the same way. They’re George W. Bush’s employees — that’s why they treat us like that.

What are we going to use for an excuse after Bush is out of office?

Whether it’s fair to demonize George W. Bush in this way, it certainly seems to me that this is exactly the intention of the Christianist right in crafting policies that are designed to ensure that the children of gay parents are constantly reminded of their illegitimacy. Just as the HIV immigration exclusion is designed to make people with HIV feel ashamed of their illness when they come and go. It maddens me to think of, say, Jenna Bush or Laura Bush  sympathizing with African women with HIV – when their husband and father supports a policy that makes the U.S. an active stigmatizer of those very women in immigration. The point of this policy is to stigmatize those with HIV. That was Jesse Helms’ intention, and he was the one who crafted the policy Bush maintains.