Andrew Sullivan can get under your skin every now and then if you’re a progressive like me, but he’s important and right on quite a bit of the time. He’s particularly insightful in his analysis of how America’s (somewhat behind-the-scenes but more and more a part of the public debate) acceptance of Torture in its response to terrorist attacks is destroying much of what we stand for.

For instance, read his analysis on Guy Fawkes Day, with this money quote:

From revulsion against torture, liberal democracy was born. And by acquiescing in torture, liberal democracy will die.

Spot on…

The Episcopal Church‘s House of Bishops has responded anew yesterday to the crisis in its worldwide communion. Here’s the sum and substance:

It is incumbent upon us as disciples to do our best to follow Jesus in the increasing experience of the leading of the Holy Spirit. We fully understand that others in the Communion believe the same, but we do not believe that Jesus leads us to break our relationships. We proclaim the Gospel of what God has done and is doing in Christ, of the dignity of every human being, and of justice, compassion, and peace. We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no male or female, no slave or free. We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ all God’s children,
including women, are full and equal participants in the life of Christ’s Church. We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ all God’s children, including gay and lesbian persons, are full and equal participants in the life of Christ’s Church. We proclaim the Gospel that stands against any violence, including violence done to women and children as well as those who are persecuted because of their differences, often in the name of God. The Dar es Salaam Communiqué is distressingly silent on this subject. And, contrary to the way the Anglican Communion Network and the American Anglican Council have represented us, we proclaim a Gospel that welcomes diversity of thought and encourages free and open theological debate as a way of seeking God’s truth. If that means that others reject us and communion with us, as some have already done, we must with great regret and sorrow accept their decision.

I’m impressed with their faithfulness and their stand on this matter.

I’m glad to read about this today:

The National Association of Evangelicals has endorsed an anti-torture statement saying the United States has crossed “boundaries of what is legally and morally permissible” in its treatment of detainees and war prisoners in the fight against terror.

Human rights violations committed in the name of preventing terrorist attacks have made the country look hypocritical to the Muslim world, the document states. Christians have an obligation rooted in Scripture to help Americans “regain our moral clarity.”

“Our military and intelligence forces have worked diligently to prevent further attacks. But such efforts must not include measures that violate our own core values,” the document says. “The United States historically has been a leader in supporting international human rights efforts, but our moral vision has blurred since 9-11.”

The statement, “An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror,” was drafted by 17 evangelical scholars, writers and activists who call themselves Evangelicals for Human Rights. The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group, announced late Sunday that it had endorsed the document.

…

“There is a perception out there in the Middle East that we’re willing to accept any action in order to fight this war against terrorism,” Cizik said. “We are the conservatives — let there be no mistake on that –who wholeheartedly support the war against terror, but that does not mean by any means necessary.”

…

The document says government and outside researchers have documented “acts of torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” against U.S. detainees, “especially in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, in Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base, in CIA black sites and at the hands of other nations.”

The authors praise the U.S. Army for last year releasing a revised field manual that bans beating, sexually humiliating and threatening prisoners, among other interrogation procedures.

But the evangelical writers criticize the Military Commissions Act, which Bush pushed through Congress last year to set up a Defense Department system for prosecuting terror suspects. The evangelicals condemned provisions of that act that allow indefinite detention for some suspects and does not always hold intelligence officials to the same standards as the military.

Quoting a wide range of sources including the Bible, Pope John Paul II, Elie Wiesel and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the authors say the federal government has a moral obligation to follow international human rights treaties that the U.S. has endorsed.

“As American Christians, we are above all motivated by a desire that our nation’s actions would be consistent with foundational Christian moral norms,” the document says. “We believe that a scrupulous commitment to human rights, among which is the right not to be tortured, is one of
these Christian moral convictions.”

The NAE says it represents 45,000 evangelical churches. However, it does not include some of the best-known conservative Christian bodies, including the Southern Baptist Convention and Focus on the Family.

Go hug an NAE member today! While you’re at it, check out the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

Spencer Ackerman reports over at TPMMuckraker that senators Dodd and Menendez are going to introduce a bill that would ban torture and restore Habeas Corpus to detainees at Gitmo. That’s a hopeful sign; the approval of the detainee trial bill last September will be a black eye on America’s moral standing for decades, if not longer, and the removal of its sanctioning of torture and the abandonment of basic constitutional protections for those under our care can’t happen soon enough. For backstory, here is some of my posting about it then (in roughly reverse order): here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

I thank Andrew Sullivan in particular for his reporting on the issue. I think we share some of the sensibilities about how torture is incompatible both with America’s best ideals and with Christian ethics, and I agree with his concern about what our use of torture has done for our international image.

His most recent post on the subject is fascinating: taking a look at the approbation of torture on popular television programs like 24 and how it impacts thinking on torture. I’d suggest reading it all.

…Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly also has a post up that reflects on Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on this subject and a LA Times entertainment article on ’24′. Money quote:

Pre-9/11: torture is used by bad guys.  That’s one of the ways you know they’re bad guys.

And today? Actually, nothing’s changed. It’s still how you know who the bad guys are. We just seem to have temporarily forgotten that.

An addendum to the last post: that reference, and many more helpful pieces on the subject of Same-Sex marriage, are included in what I think is one of the best readers on the issue: Andrew Sullivan’s Same-Sex Marriage: Pro & Con. Its a helpful collection of some of the strongest arguments on the subject, and a helpful resource.

I’d commend it, particularly given the fact that it marshals strong arguments on both sides, the author admits his own bias and position, and it is fairly balanced. You might get something out of it…

The question came up over in the comments at Mark Smith’s blog post on this subject about whether people are arguing that rearing children is the ONLY reason for marriage. Here is one argument that, in fact, argues that position. Maggie Gallager wrote this article “What Marriage is For” for the Weekly Standard (August 4-11, 2003). An excerpt:

Again, what is marriage for? Marriage is a virtually universal human institution….Not all of these marriage systems look like our own, which is rooted in a fusion of Greek, Roman, Jewish and Christian Culture. Yet everywhere, in isolated mountain valleys, parched deserts, jungle thickets, and broad plains, people have come up with some version of this thing called marriage. Why?

Because sex between men and women makes babies, thats why…

The problem with endorsing gay marriage is not that it would allow a handful of people to choose alternative family forms, but that it would require society at large to gut marriage of its central presumptions about family in order to accommodate a few adults’ desires.

The debate over same-sex marriage, then, is not some sideline discussion. It is the marriage debate. Either we win–or we lose the central meaning of marriage. The great threat unisex marriage poses to marriage as a social institution is not some distant or nearby slippery slope, it is an abyss at our feet. If we cannot explain why unisex marriage is, in itself, a disaster, we have already lost the marriage ideal.

Same-sex marriage would enshrine in law a public judgment that the desire of adults for families of choice outweighs the need of children for mothers and fathers. It would give sanction and approval to the creation of motherless or fatherless family as a deliberately chosen “good.” It would mean the law was neutral as to whether children had mothers and fathers. Motherless and fatherless families would be deemed just fine.

Same-sex marriage advocates are startlingly clear on this point. Marriage law, they repeatedly claim, has nothing to do with babies or procreation or getting mothers and fathers for children. In forcing the state legislature to create civil unions for gay couples, the high court of Vermont explicitly ruled that marriage in the state of Vermont has nothing to do with procreation. Evan Wolfson made the same point in Marriage and Same Sex Unions: “[I]sn’t having the law pretend there is only one family model that works (let alone exists) a lie?” He goes on to say that in law, “marriage is not just about procreation–indeed it is not necessarily about procreation at all.”

Wolfson is right that in the course of the sexual revolution the Supreme Court struck down many legal features designed to reinforce the connection of marriage to babies. The animus of elites (including legal elites) against the marriage idea is not brand new. It stretches back at least thirty years. That is part of the problem we face, part of the reason 40 percent of our children are growing up without their fathers.

It is also true, as gay-marriage advocates note, that we impose no fertility tests for marriage: Infertile and older couples marry, and not every fertile couple chooses procreation. But every marriage between a man and a woman is capable of giving any child they create or adopt a mother and a father. Every marriage between a man and a woman discourages either from creating fatherless children outside the marriage vow. In this sense, neither older married couples nor childless husbands and wives publicly challenge or dilute the core meaning of marriage. Even when a man marries an older woman and they do not adopt, his marriage helps protect children. How? His marriage means, if he keeps his vows, that he will not produce out-of-wedlock children.

Does marriage discriminate against gays and Lesbians? Formally speaking, no. There is no sexual-orientation tests for marriage; many gays and lesbians do choose to marry members of the opposite sex, and some of these unions succeed. Our laws do not require a person to marry the individual to whom he or she is erotically attracted, so long as he or she is willing to promise sexual fidelity, mutual caretaking, and shared parenting of any children of their marriage.

But marriage is unsuited to the wants and desires of many gays and lesbians, precisely because it is designed to bridge the male-female divide and sustain the idea that children need mothers and fathers. To make a marriage, what you need is a husband and a wife. Redefining marriage so that it suits gays and lesbians would require fundamentally changing our legal, public, and social conception of what marriage is in ways that threaten its core public purposes. …

She really doesn’t explain how expanding marriage to gays and lesbians so threatens her understanding of “its core public purposes,” but here Gallagher argues that the reason we have marriage is parenting. The threat, it seems, is to either argue for some other singular purpose for marriage or to argue for multiple purposes of marriage. The concerns she raises above do the former, arguing that marriage is really about something else. And she argues that, when you do that, you say implicitly that raising kids can happen anywhere.

She really doesn’t take up the position that Marriage is, both historically and theoretically conceived, on the one hand, and in practice today, on the other, a more complex institution than merely one for procreation marriage. She’d get closer if she modified this statement in way that doesn’t define it with the genders involved:

“Marriage is our attempt to reconcile and harmonize the erotic, social, and financial needs of [an individual] with the needs of their partner and their children.…”

As I’ve posted elsewhere, Augustine included the rearing of children as a good of marriage, along side the reigning in of sexual passions and the flourishing of the deepest of intimate friendship. I’d argue two things: people get married to have help in raising children, if they intend to have children. But also, people get married to fulfill their deepest desires for communion with another, and to experience the fullness of life that dedicating oneself to a single other offers. That transcends gender. That is why people get married, and the state has an interest in supporting that too. (In other words, the data supports not only that children do better in stable families, a bit better in traditional nuclear families but pretty good in other stable, committed family structures as well, and at the same time the data shows marriage has tangible benefits for the married individuals themselves while it also supports that marriage is better for the individuals that are married to each other; and the state has an interest in supporting both).

Gallagher argues that we allow men and women who can’t or won’t have children to marry because, well, if they *do* have children they’ll care for them in the social institution suited for it, and it discourages them from having children outside of that social institution. In some sense, any male-female marriage supports the idea of marriage as the place to rear children, even if the particular case doesn’t apply. Her concern is “motherless” and “fatherless” children. Missing is an argument about how unisex (her term) marriages-that-don’t-have-children negatively impact that problem. How does the fact that Fred and John are married and don’t plan to raise children impact, theoretically or practically, regardless of your feeling about it, the argument that children should be raised in so-called “nuclear” families? It really doesn’t. And I’m sorry, but her arguments for why the current status quo isn’t discriminatory don’t wash with me: they continue a trope that orientation is chosen and that denying your sexual orientation is necessary for both societal and individual well being. That doesn’t work. Just look at Ted Haggard as an example (the bogus fact that he was declared “completely heterosexual” recently aside).

In short, Gallagher also is arguing for an ideal of marriage that permits exceptions. That’s fine, but the other exceptions we’re talking about don’t diminish that ideal. The problem is with straight folk and their families: blessing gay folk’s unions won’t weaken straight folk, and in fact might strengthen the institution of marriage.

As for unisex couples that do want children and plan to raise them, I’m not so sure that that’s a bad thing for the children or the family. Either any children they also create would so be supported within their marriage vow, or they wouldn’t have children. Its functionally equivalent to her argument. We are saying “marriage is the best place to raise children” straight or gay. Often, its far better than the foster system. Lots of data available out there, and that’s perhaps a subject for another day’s post.

Toby, the Classical Presbyterian, points his readers to this interesting piece of news coming out of Washington State:

OLYMPIA, Wash. – An initiative filed by proponents of same-sex marriage would require heterosexual couples to have kids within three years or else have their marriage annulled.

Initiative 957 was filed by the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance. That group was formed last summer after the state Supreme Court upheld Washington’s ban on same-sex marriage.

Under the initiative, marriage would be limited to men and women who are able to have children. Couples would be required to prove they can have children in order to get a marriage license, and if they did not have children within three years, their marriage would be subject to annulment.

All other marriages would be defined as “unrecognized” and people in those marriages would be ineligible to receive any marriage benefits.

“For many years, social conservatives have claimed that marriage exists solely for the purpose of procreation … The time has come for these conservatives to be dosed with their own medicine,” said WA-DOMA organizer Gregory Gadowin a printed statement. “If same-sex couples should be barred from marriage because they can not have children together, it follows that all couples who cannot or will not have children together should equally be barred from marriage.”

Supporters must gather more than 224,000 valid signatures by July 6 to put the initiative on the November ballot.

Opponents say the measure is another attack on traditional marriage, but supporters say the move is needed to have a discussion on the high court ruling. (emphasis added)

Toby calls this an “adventure in missing the point” but it seems to me that there is a very good point here (even if this is both a fruitless and misguided application of that point): if the argument is that marriage is reserved for heterosexual couples per se because marriage itself is for the raising of children, and if you hold to the logic of that point, you’d restrict marriage to those who are or in fact do bear and raise children. It’d be a requirement. You’d not allow sterile people to get married, or anyone who wasn’t planning on it. This is just being consistent with their argument.

Or, speaking just to this narrow issue, you speak of this requirement as an ideal, and then you open other people to the institution: the sterile, those not planning to have children, and perhaps even (gasp) gays and lesbians.

Those who are “defenders of traditional marriage” like to use this argument for why marriage is a heterosexual institution but don’t follow their logic all the way through. This proposed legislation makes them do that…

…Mark Smith, someone who advances a position as a supporter of gay rights, is really concerned with this legislation. His take here…

I’d commend E. J. Dionne Jr.’s piece in the Washington Post today. An excerpt:

American politics took an important turn last week at a church in the foothills of Southern California’s Santa Ana Mountains.

When Rick Warren, one of the nation’s most popular evangelical pastors, faced down right-wing pressure and invited Sen. Barack Obama to speak at a gathering at his Saddleback Valley Community Church about the AIDS crisis, he sent a signal: A significant group of theologically conservative Christians no longer wants to be treated as a cog in the Republican political machine.

…

And thus it came to pass that when Warren called a conference at his church last Friday on World AIDS Day, among those he invited were two potential presidential candidates. It was unsurprising that one of them was Sen. Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican and a loyal social conservative who has taken up the AIDS issue with passion and commitment.

But when the other invitee turned out to be Obama, parts of the old evangelical political apparatus went after Warren as a heretic. Rob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council, declared that Obama’s views on abortion — Obama is pro-choice — represented “the antithesis of biblical ethics and morality” and insisted that Warren had no business inviting him to Saddleback.

Warren’s church issued a statement reaffirming its strong opposition to abortion, but Warren did not back down. Indeed, he seemed to revel in rejecting the old evangelical political model. “I’m a pastor, not a politician,” Warren told ABC News. “People always say, ‘Rick, are you right wing or left wing?’ I say ‘I’m for the whole bird.’ “

When it came his turn to speak, Obama took on the moral message of evangelical AIDS activists — and then challenged them.

“Let me say this and let me say this loud and clear: I don’t think that we can deny that there is a moral and spiritual component to prevention,”he declared. “In too many places . . . the relationship between men and women, between sexuality and spirituality, has broken down and needs to be repaired.”

Then Obama got to what “may be the difficult part for some,” as he put it, that “abstinence and fidelity, although the ideal, may not always be the reality.”

“We’re dealing with flesh-and-blood men and women, and not abstractions,” Obama said, and “if condoms and potentially things like microbicides can prevent millions of deaths, then they should be made more widely available. . . . I don’t accept the notion that those who make mistakes in their lives should be given an effective death sentence.”

That Obama received a standing ovation suggests that Warren is right to sense that growing numbers of Christians are tired of narrowly partisan politics and share his interest in “the whole bird.” In their different spheres, Warren and Obama are both in the business of retailing hope.

Great ending paragraph, too:

One more thing: If you read Obama’s speech, you’ll realize he demonstrates a much truer Christian spirit than the GOP masterminds who have recently tried to push people away from Obama by pointing out that his middle name is Hussein.

If you’re curious about that last reference, you can find more info, among other places, at Joshua Micah Marshall’s TPM Cafe.