Waterboarding is Torture!

In the recent televised debate on national security, several Republican presidential candidates stated their support for waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  There are, no doubt, some Democrats that support this position. But torture is torture -- and whoever says it is not is wrong – Republican or Democrat.

To take the edge of it, we often hear waterboarding euphemistically called an “enhanced interrogation technique.” But whatever it called it is torture and torture is immoral, un-American, illegal, and wrong.

As a matter of fact, after World War II, we prosecuted Japanese soldiers as war criminals for waterboarding our military personnel.  And time and time again, we hear experienced interrogators say that torture is simply not a good way to get useful information. As a police officer for over thirty years, I know that good cops get better information from suspects than bad cops!

We say we are a nation, “under God.” If that is so, then we must remember that God teaches us to defend and respect the dignity of all human beings – not to abuse and torture them.

      This issue is beyond political parties. For example, Senator McCain, our most recent Republican nominee for President, a war hero, and a survivor of torture, said that he was “very disappointed by statements supporting waterboarding. Waterboarding is torture.”

      Let’s get it straight. Regardless of our political affiliation, waterboarding is torture! And let’s not stand for it! So to make sure what we are talking about. Take a look at the Christopher Hitchens video on waterboarding: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPubUCJv58

A Writer Listens to Jesus' Stories

How does a writer like Mary Gordon approach the stories Jesus told? Especially a writer who is just like the rest of us… sometime we believe, sometimes we don’t… sometimes we wonder why all the contradictions in the stories Jesus told and the ones his followers wrote down – the Gospels? This is a great book about Jesus in the narrative, the story, by a person who loves stories and wants to love Jesus.

Mary Gordon grew up in an Italian-Irish Catholic/Jewish family. Her father converted to Catholicism. She attended Holy Name of Mary School in Valley Stream and The Mary Louis Academy High School in Jamaica, N.Y. She is Catholic.

Mary received her A.B. from Barnard College and her M.A. from Syracuse University. She is the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College.

In 1981, she wrote the foreword to the Harvest edition of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. In 1984 she was one of 97 theologians and religious persons who signed “A Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion,” calling for religious pluralism and discussion within the Catholic Church regarding the Church's position on abortion.

Novelist Galaxy Craze said this of Gordon as a teacher,

"She loves to read; she would read us passages in class and start crying, she's so moved by really good writing. And she was the only good writing teacher at Barnard, so I just kept taking her class over and over. She taught me so much."

Circling My Mother: A Memoir (2007) marked her return to nonfiction. In 2009 she published a book Reading Jesus: A Writer’s Encounter with the Gospels.  In it, Gordon uses her literary training to read the Gospels.

See what she had to say in this book…

http://books.google.com/books?id=DlZvt855VacC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Mary+Gordon&hl=en&ei=ZEPBTpO1N8nC2wWkqfizBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false