Bush’s torture confession and Yoo’s damning memos put the Catholic Hell in perspective
Ever since George Bush confessed on national television to authorizing torture, and the texts of the John Yoo torture memos came to light (First memo and 2nd memo part 1 and part 2), I’ve been wondering how to address the news here in our blog. (See the Washington Post article for details about this latest memo to be made public). To say I was speechless and sputtering with outrage and frustration is an understatement. Getting hit hard with a nasty stomach flu that put me completely out of commission for almost a week did not help either. (Hmmm; maybe there’s a cause and effect relationship there?)
But a personal anecdote is often useful when trying to put overwhelming concepts into perspective, and family matters over the last week helped me do just that. While I was sick, my 78 year old maternal aunt, paralyzed and bedridden in a nursing home, had surgery to amputate her left leg above the knee, to prevent gangrene. Any surgery in her current state of health and age risks her life, and my mother, about to turn 76 herself, was very worried and feeling her own mortality creeping up behind her. At such times, Catholics like my mother tend to take spiritual inventory and ask themselves whether they have successfully squared their accounts with God as they prepare to face judgment.
Now, I have some very strong opinions about the existence of the Christian Hell, and about the ethical and moral worth (or lack thereof) of a deity who would condemn his own children to an eternity of torture when most mere mortals would die themselves before they would willingly hurt their own child. But those diatribes are fodder for full-length cornerstone-content essays, so I won’t go into them here. Suffice to say that, when I try to comfort my mother in the face of the terrors her religion has inflicted on her over the course of a long life, I try to speak in her language, and use the arguments of a Christian theologian and moralist, rather than take the opportunity to point out yet another reason I’m pagan. That would only serve to make her tune me out entirely, anyway, and defeat my purpose.
My reasoning in this instance was simple: when the very President of the United States himself has publicly confessed to authorizing torture, God Almighty has much bigger fish to fry than a little old Irish Catholic lady who never hurt a soul in her life. Now, I have had some serious issues with my mother over the years. She was emotionally and mentally abusive; inflicted a spiritually abusive and traumatizing religion on me; and gyped me out of a lot of landmark childhood moments in life, like being part of a cheerleading squad and going camping with the girlscouts, because she was so hypochondriacal and overprotective. But however angry and resentful I have felt toward her over the years, I never hated her, and I certainly would never consign her to Hell.
If anyone could be said to deserve eternal torment roasting in a fiery pit, it is not my mother or her ilk. Not when there are egregiously evil men like George W. Bush in the world, and holding the highest office in the land to boot. And it’s not like he’s the only one, either. The entire administration is filled with men and women like Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Karl Rove (gone but not forgotten), and that’s without even leaving the White House! The line gets much longer when you pull in all the congress members in both the House and the Senate who have condoned, facilitated, and encouraged the great evils of this administration. When you get out into the media, the religous right (hello, John Hagee, yes there is a nice warm place for you in Hades to look forward to) and branch out to the tyrants in other countries, the queue goes on for miles. Trust me Mom, your God has got much worse problems than you to deal with, and compared to sinners like these you have led an exemplary life. You remember how the smart kids used to ruin the grading curve for everyone else in highschool? These gems have done the opposite for you.
So breathe easy, Christian America. Hell, if it exists, is going to be SRO for many, many eons. Y’all don’t stand a chance of getting in anytime soon.