“I don’t have a problem with it.”  This was my Dad’s clear, concise response to a fellow Christian’s assertion that waterboarding was fine by him.  I was home in Asheville, N.C. over the Christmas holidays.  My father’s friend and former church member enjoys getting a good row going.  He playfully sparred by asking my thoughts on waterboarding.  Before another heartbeat I replied,  “It’s torture.”

Not wanting to get pulled into a tit for tat and checking my emotional temperature I stated as calmly as I knew how, “You guys claim to be Christians.  I’m having a hard time squaring this with the teachings of Jesus.  It is sad to me how quickly we American’s will let go of our humanity in the name of a phantom security.”  The topic was dropped.  He went on to the next bait.

A few days ago we confirmed yet again that torture and even worse is the policy of our current government.  A declassified memo was released as part of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit to force the Bush administration to turn over documents about the government's war on terror.

The 81-page legal analysis largely centers on whether interrogators can be held responsible for torture if torture is not the intent of the questioning.  It defines torture as the intended sum of a variety of acts, which could include acid scalding, severe mental pain and suffering, threat of imminent death and physical pain resulting in impaired body functions, organ failure or death.

"Good faith may be a complete defense," the report says. "Sometimes the greater good for society will be accomplished by violating the literal language of the criminal law…In particular, the necessity defense can justify the intentional killing of one person . . . so long as the harm avoided is greater."


The policy was overturned 10 months later, but last month President Bush vetoed a Congressional bill making “enhanced interrogation” by the CIA a crime.

I’m not the first person lately to be reminded of George Orwell’s chilling novel, “1984.” "From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:  
WAR IS PEACE, 
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, 
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."

I agree that talk can be cheap.  And I am deeply distressed that circumstances keep prevailing upon me to address the morality of torture.  But, speaking immutable truth in the public square is also a powerful form of spiritual activism.  Rev. Theodore Parker echoed a teaching of Jesus.  “Truth never yet fell dead in the streets; it has such affinity with the soul of man, the seed however broadcast will catch somewhere and produce its hundredfold.”

Friday was the 40th year anniversary of Rev. Martin Luther King’s martyrdom.  Near the close of his earthly sojourn he preached this in a sermon, Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution. “I felt the need of raising my voice against that war (in Vietnam) and working wherever I can to arouse the conscience of our nation on it…There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.”

I feel helpless to stop the torture.  I am not in the Bush cabinet, I am not a lawyer, and I am not in the Congress.   I can however keep my commitment to embody the "self-evident truths" which illumine the dignity of every living thing, radiating freedom from the individual heart to the World Soul.

Whenever you can, wherever you can, however you can, please join me in this courageous chorus:

“Just as long as I have breath,
I must answer, Yes, to life;
Though with pain I made my way,
Still with hope I meet each day.  
If they ask what I did well,
Tell them I said, Yes, to life. “