Opposing Torture With All The Intolerance of Holy Love

I never, never, never thought that in my Country I would be forced to defend the opposition to torture.  I am very much out of the loop when it comes to political activity.  I pray for the government.  I pray for the Unborn.  I look for the Second Coming of Christ- that is my politics.

However, the slide in American opinion concerning torture is deeply troubling.  I have read that 54 percent of Church-going Americans think that torture is sometimes justified.  This is intolerable. I will not

 tolerate such an opinion.  I will not tolerate it by opposing it.  All opinions are not equal.  To sanction Torture is to Sanction Terrorism. Torture is simply the use of terrorism by one entity against another.  I will oppose it with the pen. I will oppose it with prayer.  I will oppose it with all the intolerance of holy love that I can evoke and call forth out of my very imperfect soul.  

This Nation has a Tradition of the defense of the helpless. A prisoner is in a position of helplessness, and no matter how heinous his alleged activity, he must be according the respect due to the helpless as a human being.  Human beings are made in the image of God, and to eschew torture is to affirm the Image of God that is within him.  It is perhaps symptomatic of our equivocation on the defense of the Unborn that has allowed our thinking on the issue of torture to become depraved.  Our discernment has been degraded because our moral sense has been coarsened.  

We have watched way too much television and movies with endless succession of violent acts.  Lord, have mercy.  In the days of Noah, prior to the Judgment of God on the whole earth by water,  violence filled the earth.  And in these days, is violence again filling the earth; is this a harbinger of the final Judgment of the Earth by Fire?  Lord, have mercy.  

American opinion has deteriorated. Consider what Ronald Reagan articulated as official Policy of our Government just a generation ago.  

Ronald Reagan, May 20,

 1988, transmitting the Convention Against Torture to the Senate for ratification:The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention.  It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called "universal jurisdiction." Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.  

Convention Against Torture, signed and championed by Ronald Reagan, Article II/IV:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. . . Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law.

Right on Brother Reagan.  God grant rest to your soul.  Christian  Institutions calling good, evil and evil, good.  For example, Notre Dame and its willingness to honor our current President, who has no moral qualms about the Institutionalized usage of abortion, that is to say- the murder, of unborn life, even to the extremes of  partial birth abortion- that is to say, scissors in the brains of babies as they are being born. Right on, Alan Keyes and Randall Terry as you lament, and decry, and don sackcloth and bewail the magnitude and folly of this offense, in the name of our Lady, the Theotokos, whose womb, received both God and the Image of God from the moment of conception, through her, 'so be it unto me according to thy word."  For the angel Gabriel had said unto her espoused, 'that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost."   Lord, have mercy, we have become coarsened, and our thinking depraved by minds Informed by ideology rather than a purified nous, heart.  I applaud our President in his opposition to torture,  and his reversal of some of the instruments of torture put in place by our previous Administration, but I decry the inconsistency of thought that is expressed in his consistent advocacy of abortion. This also extends to the  willingness to use human embryos in research.  This is, in a sense,a failure of thought, secondary to a failure of faith, and faith, like hope and love, are theological virtues.  As we fail to perceive the God who is in everything, and more specifically the God who made man in His Image, so also do we tend to fail to perceive the Image in the MEN whom He made.  An embryo is a tiny thing, and lowers the threshold, as it were, to the forces of unbelief that would make us less than human.  Men, having forgotten God, are now forgetting man.  

As Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted a generation ago  at Harvard, the sickness of the modern West is that we have forgotten God.  We have 

forgotten man, in the image of God, in the unborn; we have forgotten  man, in the image of God, in the embryo.  We have forgotten man, in the image of God, in the helpless prisoner. 

Lord, have mercy on our souls, bring repentance to this Land, and save, O Lord, the People.   Lord,  have mercy on our Government and all civil authorities. Bring peace to the world, peace to the womb, peace to the prisons. Renew our minds by renewing our Faith in Thee.  Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.  Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto the Ages of Ages, Amen.  

 The UN  Convention Against Torture   http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html