And why should President Obama listen to a bunch of religious people trying to force their private opinion onto the country? Religion has absolutely no place in politics.

The U.S. falls to level of its’ enemies when it uses torture.
Good for the faith groups.
And the above poster is right…religion has no place in politics. This isn’t religion…this is how captured people are treated by the people who capture them. The U.S. falls to the level of its’ enemies when it uses torture.

It seems that you tolerate religious groups making requests to the government only when you agree with the quest itself.
This is religion, pagansister. This is no less a matter of religion than protecting the lives of the unborn by fighting against abortion. The fact that you want to imagine a difference between them doesn’t mean a difference actually exists.

Cells aren’t prisoners of war.

Not all cells are prisoners of war, but all prisoners of war are cells.
It’s intellectually dishonest to create imaginary distinctions between the causes you support and the causes other people support. You can’t just assume that all of your causes are based neutral, objective, self-evident secular facts while everything you don’t support is just a subjective religious value. I know that’s the game you like to play, but that’s not how reasoning and argumentation work.
There’s no formal distinction between fighting for the rights of detainees and fighting for the rights of the unborn. Anyone is free to disagree with either cause, but they aren’t free (by the laws of intellectual honesty) to simply dismiss a cause by calling it “religious,” especially when the proponents of that cause are working with the same logical tools that you’re working with in support of your own cause. You certainly wouldn’t like it if religious people dismissed every one of your convictions by calling them attempts to fight the word of God trying to speak to your heart, and other people certainly don’t like it when you refuse to take their arguments seriously because you think you can write them off as all a bunch of religious rot.
You should have a go at actually engaging the positions of those you don’t agree with. You’ll find that it’s actually quite enlightening.

“Not all cells are prisoners of war, but all prisoners of war are cells.”
No, all pow’s are very sophisticated combinations of cells with knowledge and histories that make them especially susceptible to the kinds of things torturers do. If they were just cells, or even just fetuses, they’d be far, far less susceptible.
“There’s no formal distinction between fighting for the rights of detainees and fighting for the rights of the unborn.”
Yes there is: the detainees are people.

Torture is for the lazy and the ignorant. If it is the only strategy left, it is useless. Anyone who really knows something is likely to also realize that they actually have all the power, and will say pretty much anything but the truth. Torturing someone who cannot or is not likely to know anything of use is simply cruel. Condoning torture is simply foolish. It is a sign of the moral bankruptcy of the current Scarecro-W administration. Of course, it was likely the Tinman-C who actually authorized it – not having a heart makes it easier.

I really don’t know what’s so hard to understand about this, nnmns. I suspect that you fail to understand it because you simply don’t want to understand, because understanding might–gasp!–lead you to believe that we pro-lifers are actually decent people with legitimate concerns that are worth taking seriously, and I know your whole unsophisticated defense of abortion depends on your ability to hastily dismiss us as a bunch of nutjobs.
There’s no formal distinction in this sense: both are based on assumptions that not everyone holds. Neither is a self-evident truth that every rational person accepts. It’s not self-evidently true that detainees have a right not to be tortured for the sake of a “greater good,” nor is it self-evidently true that the unborn have a right not to be aborted. No rights are self-evidently true, and none of them are universally agreed upon by rational, decent people. They’re issues that have to be discussed, debated. It is the epitome of intellectual dishonesty by trying to shut the causes you don’t agree with out of the discussion by inventing false distinctions. It’s called “begging the question,” and it’s a logical fallacy, as anyone will learn in a basic logic class. You can’t argue, “My cause is different because mine involves people, but yours doesn’t,” when that very issue is one of the things under debate. That amounts to saying, “I’m right because I’m right, and you’re wrong because you’re wrong.” That’s not an argument, it’s intellectual bullying.

“There’s no formal distinction between fighting for the rights of detainees and fighting for the rights of the unborn.”
By making that (baseless) claim you are claiming detainees and “the unborn” have the same basis to have rights. You are just as guilty of ignoring my point as you claim I am of ignoring yours. And I don’t dismiss you all as nutjobs, though some of you clearly are, and dangerous ones.

“No rights are self-evidently true, and none of them are universally agreed upon by rational, decent people.”
WOW, is this not the very height of arrogance. So no one has any rights at all? That includes any of the hierarchy of needs? So much for civilization! And I guess trite, nonsensical phrase like, We hold these truths to be self-evident” should be relegated to kindergarten politics. Nate, you complain about “intellectual bullying” but I am afraid you have reduced to argument to less than that. It is simply contradiction for the sake of contradiction (Monty Python – “I’m here for an argument” “NO YOU”RE NOT”) etc…).
This is not even about the detainees’ rights. This is about a civilized (assuming you accept any definition of this beyond your own) nation dealing with threatening and recalcitrant individuals under the guise of “national security”. Hence my earlier comment that torture is the only strategy left for the ignorant and the lazy. Nothing here about the unborn or any other issue from stem cell research to gay marriage.

nnmns,
I have not dismissed your claim that fetuses aren’t human beings with rights in the same way that you and pagansister and others try to dismiss my pro-life claims. I don’t agree with your claim, and I want it to be debated in the public square, but I haven’t begged the question. I haven’t said something like “The pro-choice position shouldn’t be taken seriously because it’s based on assumptions I don’t agree with,” while that’s the very thing I was calling people out here for doing when they say, essentially, “Politicians shouldn’t take pro-life concerns seriously because the pro-lifers have assumptions I don’t agree with, therefore their arguments are nothing but expressions of subjective religious values that don’t belong in politics.”
Do you get this? I WANT to keep the debate alive, because I think the debate itself is important. You and others here appear to want to shut the debate down by creating some imaginary system of distinctions that rules the pro-life positions out of the conversation by default. You rightly object when someone would try to do the same to you and your concerns, so all I ask is that you have the basic sense of decency to not turn around and do the same to others.
So no, I’m doing what you’re doing. I’m not putting forward a claim and then using that very claim as an excuse to dismiss your claims without taking them seriously. You, on the other hand, take your claims, your assumptions, and use them to push mine out of the discussion, ending the discussion before it can ever really get off the ground. You can’t have public discourse or democracy when that tactic is employed.

Jestrfyl,
I can’t see if you just completely missed the entire point of post or not, but I certainly don’t see how your complaints really address what I’ve been trying to claim. I can’t fathom how it can be shocking to you that the ins and outs of human rights aren’t self-evident. If you spent a day in the academy, you’d quickly learn the very idea of a “right” itself isn’t even self-evident anymore, and the very notion of anything be self-evidently true is almost universally rejected in contemporary theories of knowledge…so nothing I’m saying is shocking or new in the slightest.
Just look at those who signed onto the statement, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” What was self-evident? That women couldn’t vote? That it was okay to hold slaves? Our nation’s founders couldn’t even agree on exactly what all our human rights were, or who possessed them. The very phrase itself, some have argued, was used in order to try to deny the legitimacy of any British response, not because Jefferson and the revolutionaries were actually interested in having a conservation about good government policy. Don’t forget that they were declaring independence, not looking for a debate.
The dominant position in the academy–a position advanced in large part by feminists and blacks and those writing from the underside of history–has been to deny the reality of supposedly self-evident moral truths, because more often than not claims to self-evident truth have been used to oppress rather than to liberate. And the effect of claiming something to be self-evident is to force the opposition to keep their mouths shut, to keep them in their place, by being able to dismiss them as irrational or uncivilized because they don’t recognize what any decent, rational person recognizes. So when the Native Americans or some other colonial group acts “irrationally” by not accepting our “self-evident” morality, for instance, that gives us the “self-evident” right to conquer them. We don’t have to listen to them or understand them or allow our encounter with them to raise questions about our own values, because they’ve denied “self-evident” moral truths and reduced themselves to irrational, immoral animals who don’t deserve to be taken seriously. Or such was the standard account of the colonists and the exploiters, men who built their theories on the basis of the Enlightenment commitment to self-evident moral truths, self-evident truths that no one ever seemed to agree upon and often killed each other over.
That is to say that the idea of self-evident truths has frequently been used as a tactic to force one’s opponents to shut up, and to deny any legitimacy to their positions. It’s an excuse for not questioning one’s own assumptions. The idea plays itself out for all to see in something like American Christian fundamentalism, which holds the biblical witness as a self-evident truth and uses that assumption to demonize and disregard anyone who doesn’t agree. But liberals do the same sort of thing themselves, and that’s what I fear happens here too often. Whenever someone claims that their understanding of humanity is self-evidently true, that gives them an excuse to opt out of dialogue and to dismiss positions they don’t agree with without actually engaging them.
This isn’t contradiction for the sake of contradiction. This is contradiction for the sake of being tired of being told over and over again that none of my political concerns matter because they’re just “religious” because they’re not self-evident. This is contradiction for the sake of wanting to be able to participate in public dialogue and not be shut out just because I don’t accept all the same assumptions as someone else.

Nate I don’t expect anything I say to make you or your arguments go away. I’m debating with you. I don’t expect you to change your mind but it’s my intention to point out the errors in your reasoning to any third parties who may be reading our stuff (I really wonder how many people do that, don’t you?)
It’s not my intention to discuss how much credence I give your arguments (for the most part, not much but I credit you with persistence and sometimes thoughtfulness). It’s my intention to point out the errors in your arguments just as I presume you intend to point out the errors in mine, should you find any.

Sure, nnmns. I’ll believe you when you say that you want to have a worthwhile discussion. In that case, though, I just have to stress that you don’t actually “point out the errors in [my] reasoning” by just stating your own opinion that the unborn are not human beings with rights. That’s all it is, stating your opinion against mine, but it’s not an actual argument that shows that your opinion to be better than mine. Let’s just be clear about that.

Nate and all,
I hope my silence here is not perceived as a concession – to anything other than this recalcitrant software that continues to eat my responses. I have learned the copy-andwait-to-see-what-happens method, but it is getting old.
I’ll keep trying but they really need to exterminate the termites in the software. I have noticed one good thing about this problem, it has unified the many quarrelsome voices on B’net. We all agree this software improvement scheme S*T*I*N*K*S!!!