Trump walked back the “illegal” part of the statement. Possibly you don’t know that.
How wonderfully convenient.
Yet his military advisor says as recently as May 19 that waterboarding and potentially other torture methods are still on the table.
I can’t quite figure out how to reconcile such contradictory positions.
I truly don’t understand why you would be so anxious to make Trump seem worse than he is and yet overlook his competitor’s far worse policies.
How am I? I have stated my views on Clinton and they are decisively negative in light of her support for intrinsic evil.
Again, without knowing what Pope Nicholas was talking about in admonishing against “torture” on Boris’ part, this part of the conversation is meaningless. Was he talking about the “iron maiden” or the “secret brand” or something like that?
As I stated earlier on, the Pope does actually refer to the actual torture methods being used (blows to the head and iron goads cutting the flesh at the hips or such from my memory, I quoted it in a prior post) but he goes from that point to elucidate a broader principle about using violence - any form of physical coercion - to draw out confession from a suspect, which he rejects outright as against the divine law. I can’t understand why his words aren’t anything but overtly plain in their meaning. Boris clearly understood them and took the message to heart which was why he was riddled with guilt for the rest his life.
Is it comparable to waterboarding and in the absence of the Church ever saying waterboarding as practiced on the three terrorists is “torture” are we to make an equivalence without knowing one part of the comparison and without having any Church guidance concerning the other?
If waterboarding is a form of physical or violent force used to extract some confession from a suspect to a crime then it satisfies as torture for Pope Nicholas’ test. Please read it carefully, its readily clear in its meaning IMHO.
Again, with Boris, killing family members would have been taking a sword to children, face to face, with deliberate and unmistakable intent to kill those children. When the context of Trump’s statement is clearly aimed at “rules of engagement” that prevent collateral damage, you can’t say the two are equivalent.
But I would say the collateral point is debatable. Why does he speak of the families as “targets” and bring up that debunked 9/11 families yarn if he is only speaking of collateral damage in a war zone? Those families of the plane hijackers were not in a combat zone such that they could have become collateral damage. Yet Trump still spoke of them as legitimate targets. It’s on recorded video.
The Church doesn’t say that, and it can be doubted because people undergo it voluntarily in pursuit of reasonable goals and sometimes even out of curiosity. Did anyone ever volunteer for whatever King Boris had in mind?
Some men volunteer to chop their penises off and identify as female - that doesn’t lessen the intrinsic evil of the act of self-mutilation from the Church’s perspective.
Do you seriously think that terror suspects want to undergo simulated drowning to exact a confession from their mouths?
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Torture" is one of those things that admits of subjective interpretation of the facts. Some people truly do, for example, regard “solitary confinement” as “torture”.
What isn’t plainly obvious about the moral principle that confession of guilt to a suspected crime should not be violently or physically forced upon a person? That’s what Pope Nicholas condemns as against divine law. That’s torture.
On the other hand, you are making that equivalent to the deliberate and systematic killing of a million children per year and deliberate unjust war. Elective abortion admits of no interpretation or degrees, and the Church does say that. Alive is alive, and dead is dead, and direct intent is direct intent. Civilian deaths and injuries in war are almost never the intent and might or might not happen. Killing the enemy is the intent. Killing is always the intent in abortion and it always happens.
I never said anything about equivalence between Trump and Clinton, that’s a judgement I won’t call because I’m not voting.
What I did say is that they both advocate intrinsic evils and they do.
I truly don’t know why you would protect abortion and obvious warmongering in this way. I would not have expected it.
I haven’t, as anyone can plainly testify.
I didn’t even bring Hillary into the equation - yourself and Estebob did. I was talking about Trump alone for most of these posts and have stated that Clinton supports intrinsic evil, as does he.
My position is clear.
