Sunday, February 10, 2008
Opinion

Olive Oyl vs. Popeye

Whose side is God on?

By Stephanie Ramage

I don’t attend church. I used to; I was raised a devout Mormon. After leaving the church at 23, I spent many years exploring Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism. Far from being anti-religion, I am irreligious. I believe that religion has clearly been a force for good in this world. Still, I don’t want to see the division between church and state eroded, because it is that very wall that protects the rights of religious minorities as well as my right not to ascribe to any religion. That is my choice, one to which the founders of my country believed I have an inalienable right.

But I do have a deep and abiding belief in God. Maybe I don’t know Him as well as others, but I think I may know a tiny bit about Him, and I believe that He does not sanction torture.

When Ann Coulter—the author of “Godless,” a book in which she shrilly and clumsily seeks to indict secular America—told Sean Hannity recently that she would support Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton rather than Republican Sen. John McCain in the general election because McCain opposes torture, she flung that word, “torture,” around like Olive Oyl waving a feather boa.

“You say ‘interrogation,’ I say ‘torture,’” she proudly told Hannity. And since that “godly” woman’s willing to embarrass herself to get some ink, I’ll give it to her.

McCain has more right to decry torture than any other politician in Washington—including liberals. He knows more about it than anyone else because he was once a victim of it at the hands of the Viet Cong. That’s why his jaw sticks out like Popeye’s. In August 1968, for four days, he was bound and brutalized by the Viet Cong, his teeth literally beaten from his jaw. McCain has consistently opposed torture, because America should never, ever sink to behaving as thug nations do.

Coulter ridicules him because she believes she has the backing of a conservative majority. But she and other right-wing self-described “Christians” have forgotten that there are a lot of us old-school conservatives raised by World War II veterans who believe that torture has no place in an honorable military’s activities. Enough of us, in fact, to sweep McCain to the nomination.

I talked with a soldier some time ago, a man newly returned from Afghanistan. I asked him about a building in a photo he showed me. His face showed embarrassment; he was reluctant to talk about it. “That’s where they do the torture,” he said, with the sheepish look of a boy who is saying something he shouldn’t say. He moved on quickly to the next photo, but I felt sickened that our soldiers, the people the whole world used to admire, have been expected to participate in activities that their fathers and grandfathers would associate with the Viet Cong and the Nazis.

A year ago, I was speaking with a European diplomat about our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. He brought up the great love that the WWII generation in Europe has for America. But then he asked: “Why are your soldiers now torturing people? Even if those prisoners are guilty”—and he did believe they were guilty—“why are American soldiers torturing them? It just doesn’t seem like something American soldiers would do.”

I had no answer for that. And people like me, who fully support our military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, are tired of the indefensible topic of torture. You simply cannot be a real American, and you certainly can’t call yourself a Christian, and support torture. Throughout our history we have opposed it not only because of what it does to the victim, but also because of what it does to those who employ it. In terms of getting information, it is vastly ineffective. In terms of what it does to our image of ourselves, and the image that others have of us, it is devastating.

What others think of us matters in our pursuit of peace. As early as 1803, during America’s war with the Barbary pirates, Capt. William Bainbridge, who stressed “lenity” and “humanity,” said of the capture of a Moroccan man-o'-war crew, “I sincerely hope that this capture may be productive of good effects to the U.S. … to impress on their mind a favorable opinion of the American character.”

That tradition continued through WWII. My father used to tell me stories about how he and his fellow Marines would play checkers or poker with their Japanese prisoners, sometimes playing for the high stakes of an American candy bar. My father gained a great understanding and compassion for the Japanese, and the prisoners he guarded came to know the true nature of Americans. The humane way in which those prisoners were treated by their American captors destroyed all the propaganda they had been fed by their Emperor’s minions. I suspect that my father and his fellow soldiers got more information out of their prisoners through such interactions than our military has won through a hundred waterboarding sessions.

There are those who would say that there is no comparison between the Japanese soldiers of 1943 and suspected members of al-Qaida in 2008. But who the prisoner is or isn’t is entirely irrelevant—what matters is who our soldiers are. They are Americans, and torture is not the American way. And if you believe in God, you can’t possibly believe it’s His way, either. SP