Nathan Sheets

Many of the more "progressive" Evangelical Christians are supporting Obama this election season. This has been interesting because, while I was becoming more and more conservative, many of my peers were becoming more and more liberal. While I no longer hold my Christian affiliation, I still find the liberalism invading American Christianity disturbing.

But seriously...Obama? What are people thinking? Many liberal newspaper articles discussing the evangelical support for Obama--especially among "young people"--all say that abortion is an issue of lesser concern, and more and more people are concerned with feeding the poor and imposing socialism on our health care system.

It's one thing to support abortion in the first trimester. It's easy to kill a fetus who is less developed, less valuable and, of course, less visible to our eyes. But third-trimester babies? How insane do you have to be to support this on-demand?

In another friend's blog, we are having an interesting discussion on abortion. She is from the UK, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the major pro-abortion groups over there do not support abortion-on-demand throughout all nine months of pregnancy. I was skeptical at first, but several people reaffirmed this. Britain currently has a 24 week limit, which is still horrifying, but hell, it's a limit. And the pro-choice groups don't hysterically insist that women are dying because of it. They are happy with their limit.

But here in the US our pro-choice groups insist upon abortion availability throughout all nine months of pregnancy, for any reason, and Obama's their man. He and his wife have advocated and voted for it time and time again. If you think such a man has respect for life because he wants to force middle-class me to pay more in taxes to help feed "the poor", try reconciling the photo above, brought to us by Cranky Catholic (via Jill Stanek). If you think that feeding the poor through social programs and yet slaughtering the unborn makes us "progressive", you need a serious reality check. 

California's Top Court Overturns Same-Sex Marriage Ban

Once again, liberals get a court to hand them what the people don't want.

And I wonder why all of the Californians book it up here.

Perhaps it is because I have only relatively recently started accepting the fact that I'm gay, but I've gone from being completely uninterested in legalizing gay marriage to being completely uninterested in legalizing gay marriage. The arguments people throw out ("Love is love! OMG WTF!!!111!1") are so simplified that it's laughable.

California's voters, known for their right-wing extremism, already said they don't want gay marriage. California already has what is basically gay marriage with their blessed civil unions. And yet the liberals cannot abide not having their way, so they get a court to give whatever they want to them. And it will be appealed. And it will be struck down.

Do liberals not want to work for what they want and get people on their side? Just like with abortion, a court had to give them what they wanted without them using democracy.

Sensible thoughts from Gay Patriot.

EDIT: For those of you who have forgotten, let me explain how the United States is supposed to work. Your state has laws that reflect the values of the people. If you don't like it, you simply and very easily move to a state with your values. I don't care that people in California want gay marriage--what I care about is that they are forcing an entire state, through the courts of all pathetic places, to adhere to their set of values when they can simply move to Massachusetts.

EDIT 2: OK, it_gurl explained the court's thought process to me in a way that I understand. Read her comment here. Feel free to spam her for being right.

Currently in the United States there is quite a bit of controversy over our country's only form of torture used on enemies. It's called waterboarding, and I am perfectly willing to concede that waterboarding is, in fact, a form of torture. Does that mean I'm against it? No, of course I'm not.

Conservatives have continued to insist that waterboarding is not torture because, well, we approve of it, and torture is "bad", so it couldn't possibly be torture. I used to be on that bandwagon, but after doing some reading on waterboarding, I see absolutely no reason why it should not be considered torture. And for that matter, I see no reason why we shouldn't do it. Believe me, if you were ever to be tortured, this is the kind of torture you would want.

When people think of torture, they think automatically of unjust torture, being done by a corrupt government or religious oligarchy to obtain information out of a person or, perhaps, to merely punish them. We see Gary Larson's Far Side or we think of Amnesty International's work.
Amnesty International has taken the stand, along with a lot of other people, that torture is morally wrong at the most basic level (while, ironically, taking the stand that abortion is a basic, fundamental right). At first it makes sense. But really, especially in relation to waterboarding, I don't see how torture is any more wrong than, say, jailing someone for years until they confess to a crime.

It's interesting to note that the people at Guantanamo on whom the United States has used waterboarding were not random people who were disliked by the leaders of our country: they were known Muslim terrorists, whose macho, "Allah, bitch!" attitude was quickly drowned out (no pun intended) when we started pouring water on their faces. They sang like birds and, because of their confessions and leaks of information, attacks that were meant to kill several thousand Americans have been thwarted.

Take, for instance, the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed captured in Pakistan in March of 2003. One of the masterminds of 9/11 and al-Qaeda’s operational leader at the time, he possessed a wide-ranging knowledge of the network’s plans, logistics and personnel. Unwilling to share it voluntarily, he was subjected to forced interrogation. As resilient as he was and defiant, he held out until the interrogators decided to proceed with waterboarding. Two and a half minutes into the procedure, a broken Mohammed begged for relief. Stunned and shaken, his extensive confession amounted to nothing less than a treasure trove of priceless intelligence.

This case is unusual not in how quickly the waterboarding worked, but how long Mohammed was able to withstand it. Two and a half minutes is by all accounts a record of sorts, as most subjects usually break down inside a minute. CIA agents who undergo this procedure as part of their training rarely last more than 40 seconds. This despite the fact that they are in a friendly environment and know that death is not an option. --Vasko Kohlmayer, FrontpageMag.com

Republicans trying to make a distinction between "torture" and "harsh interrogation measures" has proved to be pointless in that many people still view waterboarding as torture, again because of the visions of dungeons and tables with spikes from the medieval era that the word "torture" produces.

Ann Coulter points out that, yes, there is a moral problem with torturing people that you don't like. But torturing people that you know for sure are withholding information from you "actually works quite well". Indeed, the question is: why are they being tortured?

America is at war with terrorists, and yet liberals (and John McCain, incidentally) do not want to use the most effective way of saving American lives that we have. That way happens to be waterboarding, which has no lasting health effects and lasts, at most, two minutes. It can break the most cocky Muslim, as it did with K.S. Mohammad. Indeed, many are now even calling for Guantanamo to be shut down and terrorists to be either released or put in the United States, all because of waterboarding!

If you think that thousands of innocent lives could be saved by torturing someone that is a) planning to kill them personally or 2) is involved in the plot to kill them for an entire two minutes is morally wrong, I'd have to ask why. We're not cheese-grating them to death, or pulling their bodies apart with rhinos. We're putting them in pain for a minute so they'll be broken and spill the information that will save countless lives. Have Americans already forgotten the horror of September 11th?