Torture

Andrew Sullivan takes the occasion of the opening of the new movie Amazing Grace to note the link between slavery and torture:
As Scott Horton explains more fully here, when Wilberforce and Wesley aimed to persuade the British elites that the slave trade was evil, they did not cite Biblical proscriptions against slavery. Why? Because the Bible is actually very ambiguous about slavery (the Southern Baptist Convention even used scripture to defend slavery in America). So Wilberforce stressed that the slave trade required unspeakable cruelty, abuse and torture of its victims. That was his rhetorical gambit. He framed his case against the slave trade as a case against inhumane treatment of prisoners of war.


He points out that torture is an essential ingredient of slavery.

Of course, Andy being Andy, he can't resist trying to make it an equivalence relation. That dodo, though, won't fly.

Not that Cheney or Bush is likely to have any more respect for the Bible than they have for the Constitution.

via Josh Marshall

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