Spitting in America’s face

Michael Goldfarb is still the most loathsome person in America:

For those most committed to the ridiculous crusade for terrorist rights, “enhanced interrogation” is not only immoral and illegal, it’s ineffective. That argument, like Khalid Sheik Mohamed, doesn’t hold water. Obviously it works sometimes, and there are plenty of senior officials, including both the current and former DNI, who have said as much. More responsible critics are satisfied to argue that the technique is illegal. Maybe they’re right, but there are plenty of lawyers, and at least one Supreme Court Justice, who will argue the other side of that. [...]

As to the morality of the methods used, I don’t see anything immoral about smacking around a terrorist or making him sit in the cold or dunking him in the water, but you can argue it either way. Still, I wonder why the same people squealing about the alleged moral indignity to which these monsters were subjected are the same people who want the government to keep morality out of their bedrooms and doctors’ offices. Why should the government be forbidden from making a moral judgment about gay marriage or abortion but compelled to make a moral judgment about the treatment of terrorists plotting to murder Americans citizens? [Emphasis mine]

It’s simple: gay marriage and abortion are contentious social issues for which there isn’t a clear moral answer, and no clear consensus. The government could make a moral judgment about both, but it would do so at the cost of disrespecting the moral pluralism that we hold in high value.  By contrast, torture has been anathema to Western and democratic values for centuries.  Indeed, there isn’t even a real debate over whether or not torture is wrong; even the torturers recognize that it is a profound violation of human dignity.  That’s the whole point.  That’s why you do it.

As Americans, we are inheritors of a political and moral tradition which places human rights and the dignity of human life at the forefront of our identity.  More than almost anything else, torture spits in the face of what it means to be a citizen of this country.  To call torture anything other than an affront to everything this country stands for is to insult the men and women who fought and died to push this country closer to realizing its ideals.  Not only does Goldfarb not understand this, he can’t understand this, and is more than willing sacrifice his country’s ideals to the false idol of “security.”