I stopped short on this headline on a Religion New Service story: Poll shows support for torture among Southern evangelicals. The story was about a poll released in Atlanta at a conference Evangelicals for Human Rights co-sponsored. It said that 57 percent of the white evangelicals interviewed said torture can be often or sometimes justified when interrogating suspected terrorists. When a thoroughly leading question was asked - that "the U.S. government should not use methods against our enemies that we would not want used on American soldiers" - the result changed so that the majority said torture was rarely or never justified.I wonder how Catholics would have responded.
Paul Moses, a contributing writer at Commonweal, is the author of The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam and Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace (Doubleday, 2009) and An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York’s Irish and Italians (NYU Press, 2015). Follow him on Twitter @PaulBMoses.
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