Recent letter to the editor.

Please feel free to copy, edit, personalize and send to your local paper.

September 28, 2006

Have we as a nation so lost our moral compass such that we can even conceive of, much less tolerate, the possibility of compromise on a bill to allow torture as a policy of the United States? This bill has more to do with our national identity than with national security. To allow torture is to sanction those very attributes we have thus far as a nation condemned in others, including the terrorists whose actions we purport to condemn. It is to take the very torch of freedom we have in the past held high, and use it to sear the flesh of those some have determined, without the right of a fair trial, to be guilty. It is to say to our children that the very actions condemned in the halls of our schools, are, in the halls of our government, to be sanctioned as a statement of who we are as a people. How our representatives vote on this issue, is a statement less about their stand on terrorism, than it is about their own personal moral compass, and should, for all who claim devotion to the God of creation, be a major consideration in how we as a people vote for those who represent us in Washington.