Monday, January 07, 2008

Betcha didn't know that

The head of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture is a UU.

Note that I said "National Campaign" not "UU Campaign." It's an awesome, inclusive organization that helped put together "Evangelicals for Human Rights" and is reaching out to religious people of lots of creeds and trying work for human rights together.

It's interfaith and awesome and it received an award from NYU's Program for Survivors of Torture for NRCAT’s “extraordinary work” in seeking to abolish torture. In making the award, the NYU noted that NRCAT’s “moral leadership brings the light of hope to this dark time in our nation’s history.”

This is doing it right, kids. I'm so proud of this woman, and to our faith for supporting her.

CC

4 comments:

Lilylou said...

Very cool indeed! I'm proud to say that my congregation here is co-sponsoring, with the local Quakers, the showing of "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib", on Jan. 11, which is the day chosen to call attention to the moral issue of torture.

Anonymous said...

I heard about this from someone - a bunch of UU churches are involved with this campaign.

While working on this Real Wealth of Portland project, I've been quite amazed at how many UUs in my city are involved in progressive community building and work. It seems like every time we have a meeting, and we talk about an organization or group that's doing work related to economic justice, children's rights, sustainability, or the peace movement - there's a UU somewhere in the leadership. It's quite encouraging.

Bill Baar said...

I hope she has a better definiton of torture than what Rev McTigue from the UU Church in Hartford offered on O'Riley a while back.

When asked if an enemy combatant could be coerced to yield more than name, rank, and serial number; and when that coercion would become torture, she admitted she didn't know.

Pretty amazing for someone who had paid for a billboard condeming Lieberman during his campaign over it.

Democrats by the way will be running Gen Sanchez's public affairs officer during Abu Garib for Congress in Illinois's 6th CD.

She wrote at the time on her blog from Iraq,

Figen shared with me what it was like to spend 7 months under Iraqi occupation. As she told me the horrors of living in Kuwait under the occupation, I realized that if we had not had the first war, Saddam may have been impossible to stop with the oil under his total control. The men who did terrible things to the Kuwaitis, especially the Kuwaiti women are very similar to the men we are fighting. As people get upset about Abu Ghraib, one thing that should never be forgotten: these are men who have murdered Americans and would continue to murder Americans if given the opportunity.

Democrats really need to get their act together her. If UU's could define torture for them it might be a start.

Needless to say, considering many of these prisoners weren't terrorists to begin with, or being held as such, it was just plain abuse. Why Morganthaler choice to excuse it this way something she's going to need to explain.

Bill Baar said...

Laura Flander in The Nation blog OBAMA BE BOLD: BREAK WITH A BACKER ON TORTURE....

Obama gets a lot of breaks.