Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller back in February posted a video commentary, saying that just because people like Bush and those who support him are wrong—very, very wrong—that doesn’t mean they’re evil. He makes a compelling point.

Of course, then I run across a story like that from Christopher Anders of the ACLU, describing what he sees when he visits Guantánamo. I knew without even asking that congressmen never visited Guantánamo, that very few of the people who support or allow it to go on have visited. I myself have never visited, and I never want to. I’m sure I would instantly vomit all over that worshiped ground and would be immediately employing the services of a psychologist in order to deal with the trauma of such a visit.

Here’s the Penn Jillette video:

I am innately unable to treat vile injustice as a mere intellectual pursuit. I am unable to maintain emotional distance. I would make a horrible counsellor. That’s why when I read a story like Chris Anders’s, I have a truly difficult time grasping that men like Bush and others who place their approval upon these proceedings are not in truth evil. A few snippets:

• “It turns out that the main basis for ‘conspiracy’ and ‘material support for terrorism’ charges against this skinny, graying man who is pushing 50 is that he was a cook in training camps sometimes frequented by Osama bin Laden.”

• “[E]ven Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg were able to have German lawyers. But the prosecutors claimed today that the Military Commissions Act overrides the Geneva Conventions, that the Constitution does not apply, and that the cook therefore cannot talk to his Sudanese lawyer without a security officer listening in on his attorney-client conversations.”

• “[T]he prosecutor argued that the ancient protection of the Ex-Post Facto Clause of the Constitution (which prohibits the government from applying criminal laws retroactively) does not apply at Guantánamo and that Congress could do anything it wanted to do with the Military Commissions Act — even criminalize acts that were not crimes when done.”

• “The main goal of the judge was to try to explain to the detainee the few rights that he has under the Military Commissions Act.”

My own father this past holiday posed to me whether we can actually remain safe against terrorists while the Constitution is in force. The bile and acid of revulsion welled up in my gut, and I thought I was going to spew our turkey dinner across his living room carpet.

The Constitution was written to protect us, the innocent, against our own government. We are supposed to have a government of law, not of men—whether evil or just merely wrong—and the Constitution is the highest law in the land. If we willingly chop down every law in the land in order to get at the devil, then when the devil turns back toward us, where will we hide, having destroyed every law under which we might have taken refuge?

Moreover, the Constitution was designed to prevent injustice and to ensure that only justice was done. Now, I know, we regularly discard the Constitution in this country, out of fear, out of prejudice, even out of hate. But that makes the practice neither right nor just, because real, live human beings, whom God has charged us to love, become the objects of our injustice.

Lashing out in violence against other human beings, even in the name of antiterrorism—which is in fact fear—will never produce peace, will never save us from terrorists, and will never protect us and make us prosperous. Rather, it will only bring upon us the very terror we fear.

But even if one doesn’t believe that peaceableness is more likely to benefit us than violence from fear or hate, one certainly must admit that peaceableness is the moral response to fear and hate, and violence, the immoral response. I for one would be unable in good conscience to stand before my Maker, knowing that I had supported a politician in his quest to do such violence on my behalf.

There are two possibilities: Either this small insight is genius to my fellow American, and he is a childish ignoramus. Or else I have a conscience, and he is evil.

(I am not saying which one.)

Perhaps you can at least sympathize with the following sentiment: May God judge you and me according to the good or evil of which we approve by our own consciences, and in that holy judgement, may He show us the same consideration we have shown others.

-TimK

P.S. Compare Matthew 7:1-2.