We hear a lot about this topic lately. Most Americans who are awake understand what it involves, and most of those have an opinion about it. Generalities are always suspect, but attitudes about waterboarding, and torture in general, seem to have coalesced around the political divide in our country. Progressives and liberals seem to judge the subject from a philosophical and ethical point of view, and are horrified that the US has resorted to such methods. Conservatives seem to believe that anything less than torture makes us look weak, and dangerously helpless.

Is it an oversimplification to say that conservatives are bedwetting cowards, terrified of the big bad Islamist bogeyman slavering outside our borders and just waiting for a chance to sneak over our borders and murder us all in our sleep, then forcing our women to dress in burkas? Well, maybe, but aren’t there a lot of similarities between the Islamic fundamentalists outside our orders and the faux-christian fundamentalists inside the country?

Both groups seem to have tremendous hang-ups about women as equal partners. They both appear to have some pretty strange problems about how women address the issues of their “personhood”. (Is there such a word? I mean the fact that women are sentient beings with minds of their own, more than just breeding machines.) Both seem eager to force religion across the broad base of the culture, realigning the process of civil and criminal law, as well as the entire process of government, to conform to their interpretations of laws supposedly handed down from a burning bush.

Mark Paul has written an engaging piece about torture in Friday’s paper.

Two centuries after the Bill of Rights, a half century after the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners, torture is no longer an evil to be denounced; it’s an open question. “McCain Finds Sympathy on Torture Issue,” a Nov. 16 New York Times headline proclaimed. It doesn’t get any more official than that. Forget earmarks and Social Security; in Election 2008 it looks as if we get to vote on stress positions, sleep deprivation, waterboarding, and maybe even the rack. And the blogosphere, as usual, has got a head start on arguing what kind of place America wants to be.

The piece is well worth reading in its entirety because it highlights a specific problem that straddles the chasm the right has created in our country. Are all men equal? Are they “men”? Are some “men” more human than others? What precise justification does the right offer for the use of torture as a weapon of intelligence gathering, other than Jack Bauer’s certainty of a ticking nuclear bomb? I use the word “weapon” intentionally because doing physical, emotional, or psychological harm to another is an act of violence. I’m pretty surer waterboarding is at least one of those. Maybe we could ask John McCain because he’s actually an expert on that stuff, although his official opinion on torture seems to waver as his political fortunes change.

Mr Paul points out a few illustrative comments from public personalities both supporting and condemning the use of torture. The right seems to be obsessed with that bogeyman fear of the nuclear bomb. The Left, on the other hand, seems to focus on silly things facts, and law.

With McCain a “courageous” exception among GOP candidates, “The use of torture is fast becoming a core principle of today's Republican party,” conservative Andrew Sullivan asserts at TheAtlantic.com. “My sense is that many in the base are uncomfortable with the defensiveness of the Bush people, and their use of euphemism in this respect.”

A cynical observer would probably grasp the fact that the Bu$hies have a lot to be defensive about.

They’ve focused their laser-like mentalities on the “war on terrorism” which seems to me to be rather bogus, like the “war on poverty.” We lost that war; the poor are in greater numbers today than they were 40 years ago. We also fought a “war on drugs” and if anyone thinks we’ve won that war they just have to go down to any city neighborhood and start asking about prices.

Likewise, we see that the Right, which has historically been wrong on every other topic of public discussion, is enthusiastically backing this evil policy which has been condemned by every modern democracy.

What does this say about their ability (or inability) to authoritatively lead in this “war on terror” that they have so urgently espoused? Mark Paul describes their position on torture as “agnostic,” which I don’t quite understand, since the US has spent the last 60 years publicly condemning nations that use torture as a means of investigation and punishment.

As is usual for the Right, there is a stunning lack of protest about the official barbarity of the Bu$h malAdministration. One of the few dissenting voices on the dark side of the political chasm comes from Tony Perkins’ Family research Council, of all places.

Writing in The Evangelical Outpost, Joe Carter, director of web communications for the FRC, and a former marine, wrote:

“As Christians we must never condone the use of methods that threaten to undermine the inherent dignity of the person created in the image of God. Murdock may believe there is nothing “repugnant” about waterboarding. But there is something clearly repugnant about our unwillingness to distance ourselves from the fear-driven utilitarians willing to embrace the use of torture.”

The McClatchy article specifically suggests readers go to that Evangelical Outpost article and read some of the comments the good Christians have written. Apparently it’s moral to kill and torture people if they don’t believe in the Jewish carpenter.