Repeating Myself

Last updated on: January 1, 2015 at 3:00 pm by Mark Shea

Repeating Myself 2015-01-01T15:00:20-07:00 Mark Shea

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A reader in deep denial writes about this post:

What is this the 60th post bashing dumb Conservatives; yet when the Washington Post points out the obvious fact the Madame Pelosi knew about this what do you say? Nothing other than a few lines about everyone should be prosecuted. Yet you wonder why people call you biased.

The moment a battalion of Pelosi-defenders appears in my comboxes to try to deny the bleedin’ obvious, I will have more to say. Till then, what do you want me to do?: repeat again that any Dem who approved the Bush Torture regime should also be prosecuted? Okay:

Any Dem who approved the Bush Torture regime should also be prosecuted. I’ve got no problem at all saying that. It’s just that I see no need to repeat it since I don’t have any Pelosi-defenders beseiging me with denials, excuses, evasions, and doubletalk.

You se, my time is taken up with conservatives, not Dems, trying to deny the bleedin’ obvious. You appear to be one of them.

I’ve got no problem at all with prosecuting Pelosi or any other Dem who signed off on the Bush torture regime. But the fact remains that it was the *Bush* torture regime, deny it how you will.

The funny thing about the strange new claim that I am somehow a Secret Democrat for failing to sign each post with a ritual denunciation of Pelosi is the new layer of self-contradiction being added here.

“It’s not torture. It’s not wrong. Besides, it works, even if it is torture (which it isn’t).

And Democrats are evil for approving of it! Why isn’t Shea demanding their prosecution more?”

Make up your mind. One way to do that is to stop talking nonsense and just hold a coherent position like “It’s torture. It’s a war crime. Anybody who approved it should be prosecuted. It was pushed by the Bush Administration and the Dems immorally played along. Now they are hypocritically pretending to be shocked and making noises about prosecution, but will never actually do anything because they will never allow themselves to be held to account for approving of Bush war crimes.”

See! There’s enough disgusting hypocrisy to go around for both parties! That’s why I refuse to support either of them.

However, the most disgusting (and stupid) hypocrisy is to claim a prolife mantle while fighting tooth and nail to support torture of prisoners. It is to chuck the Church’s teaching about the dignity of human life right out the window.

Yes, yes. I know all about the distinction between guilty terrorists (at least, you think they might be guilty of something or other–until you find out they aren’t and have to lie to cover it all up) and innocent babies.

Guess what? Guilty terrorists retain their fundamental human dignity (you know, that “dignity of the human person” that used to be the basis for all our prolife arguments?). If you predicate that human beings lose that dignity according to the level of how guilty you suspect they might be of some sin or crime, then you are basically declaring open season on human dignity. As Tom Kreitzberg says:

To say, “I’d commit a terrible sin against a terrible sinner in order to save five million innocents,” is not to risk a slippery slope. It is to declare that any and every point on the slope — a sin of any gravity upon a person of any guilt for a good of any magnitude — is open for negotiation.

And it’s not God we’re negotiating with.

You are also moving the sentencing phase of the trial to the investigation phase by declaring that torture is punishment for crime and not (as you previously said) merely for “obtaining information”. That’s what you mean when you say the guy you are torturing is “guilty” compared to the aborted baby. You are also overlooking that little clause about “cruel and unusual punishment”.

If you backtrack from this and try to pretend that you *aren’t* advocating torture because the suspect is “guilty” of something but merely to “obtain information”, you are basically laying the groundwork for the torture of innocents.

But mostly, you are making a mockery of anything like a coherent Catholic prolife position. At best, you are declaring yourself to be, not prolife but anti-abortion while entirely abandoning the concept of the dignity of human life upon which the Church’s whole case against abortion rests. Good luck with that.

Doees this mean I am saying capital punishment is intrinsically immoral? No. Capital punishment (properly applied) respects the dignity of the human person and does not reduce him to an object. Read and learn. So it still can be legitimately applied (albeit in circumstances that are vanishingly rare as the Catechism notes). But torture does not do this. It’s purpose is to reduce the person to an object: a means to some other end. The excuses for it are even more vanishingly rare than those for capital punishment, while the fruits of it are actually corrosive to the civil order.

Nobody expects dolts like Nancy Pelosi to be anything but dolts. Part of the point of the prolife movement is to provide a counter-example of how to think with the Church about the dignity of human life. But now many in the prolife movement itself are busying themselves with making excuses for torture that boil down to saying, “What so great about human dignity and all that touchy feely junk when the human under consideration is somebody we are afraid *might* be a terrorist?”

Indeed, I have actually seen the incredible spectacle unfolding in various places around the blogosphere where some parties are actually appealing to the burning of heretics as some sort of summum bonum of past praxis justifying the use of torture. The actual teaching of the Catechism:

2298 In times past, cruel practices were commonly used by legitimate governments to maintain law and order, often without protest from the Pastors of the Church, who themselves adopted in their own tribunals the prescriptions of Roman law concerning torture. Regrettable as these facts are, the Church always taught the duty of clemency and mercy. She forbade clerics to shed blood. In recent times it has become evident that these cruel practices were neither necessary for public order, nor in conformity with the legitimate rights of the human person. On the contrary, these practices led to ones even more degrading. It is necessary to work for their abolition. We must pray for the victims and their tormentors.

…goes for nothing as ever more ingenious sophistries are attempted to square the circle.

And all by people who would doubtless identify themselves as faithful, conservative, prolife Catholics. It’s surreal.

History will look back on this time as a period of madness for the prolife movement. Idiots like Nancy Pelosi have, at least, the excuse that their Leftism has long blinded them to the grave evils they routinely perpetrate on the dignity of the human person.

What excuse has the prolife anti-abortion torture defender?

Corruptio optimi pessima.

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