The question has been raised, Was it appropriate for a Catholic TV network to provide a platform for a torture advocate? In my view, the answer is yes. Marc Thiessen, who appeared on Raymond Arroyo’s TV show The World Over, defends the practices of the past decade because he believes that these practices are necessary to defend innocent lives. Not having followed his work in detail, I have no reason to believe that he is acting in bad faith. He was a government official with some knowledge of the issue. His conscience tells him that there is a moral necessity to disregard the Catholic Catechism in this particular case — and, as Newman reminded us, conscience has sacred claims. Furthermore, if the polls are to be trusted, he speaks not only for the majority of Americans but for the majority of American Catholics. His is, therefore, a view that it would be unwise to omit from the discussion. The fault was not in giving Marc a platform; the fault, if any, was in not having a guest who defended the official teaching, and thus perhaps leaving a misimpression of what the official teaching is.

I realize I run the risk of being accused of special pleading in this defense of Marc (and of EWTN), so I should probably point out that I disagree with him on the underlying issue. I think torture is a great evil, and that the resort to it in the past decade is a black spot on America’s record. But I am not in a stone-throwing mood against people like Marc, because I realize that the accusation that someone is not living to up to his or her religious creed is one of the lowest and least helpful arguments imaginable. For heaven’s sake, I — in religious matters — am now a rather liberal high-church Episcopalian, and I find even that pronouncedly lenient ethic hard to live up to. And, on the very issue of torture, it is easy for me to imagine a case in which I would break down and allow it: Say it’s 1942, and the Nazis, having conquered England and the U.S. eastern seaboard, have developed an H-bomb and plan to use it against St. Louis to bring the rest of the U.S. into submission. American forces in St. Louis have in custody a Nazi agent with knowledge of the specifics that would enable them to foil the attack and turn the tide of the war. The Nazi agent is being uncooperative. I concede that it would be morally wrong to torture him — but I also admit that I would more than likely sacrifice that principle. (An interrogator in Iraq, interviewed for an anti-torture video I saw recently, says he and his crew were up against ticking-time-bomb scenarios often, and were able to get the information they needed without resort to torture. I’m not sure I would have the moral courage to take the chance that he is right.)

So the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak: I accuse myself. I have been dismayed by how rapidly the resort to torture has been undertaken in recent years, in response to much lesser threats than the one in my hypothetical. (Two or three incompetent pantybombers in a decade doth not a Hitler make.) But I recognize that my difference from Marc and the others on his side of this discussion is one of degree, not of kind. And there are other reasons to ask people for generosity of spirit – notably because we may have need of it ourselves. I recently found myself in a position that makes me realize what it must be like to be Marc Thiessen, even as I took a point of view quite distant from his. I was at a meeting at a liberal Catholic parish here in New York, the purpose of which was to discuss how to stop U.S.-sponsored torture. People were angrily declaiming, How is it possible that the U.S. could permit such a heinous practice? To which I responded, basically, with the following explanation: It is a negative consequence of something that is actually very positive about our country. More than any other country, we believe that there is no limit to what we can achieve, no problem that can’t be solved, no obstacle that can’t be overcome. This is the attitude that has made us great, but it also exposes us to the risk that we can come to believe that there are no real moral limits that conflict with our desires. When we find that an unborn child is inconvenient, for example, we redefine it as not having ‘personhood,’ and kill it — problem solved! Similarly, now, when he have a real (or just suspected) jihadist in our custody, we say, he should be understood not chiefly as a rights-bearing person with human dignity that should be respected, but rather as a box containing secrets that we can rip apart at will — and now our country is safe! We figure out what we want to do, then we set talented lawyers the task of defining our new limits in accord with our desires. Harry Blackmun spent many months researching the law, consulting medical professionals and concerned citizens, before writing the legal memo “drawing the lines” on abortion — a memo we now call Roe v. Wade. The legal justifications for torture, and the widespread public support for it, materialized in a similar way.

Now, there were perhaps, in that room, some people who were not offended by what I said; there may even have been some who were in agreement. But the only audible and visible response was negative — eye-rolling, dark mutterings, and dirty looks, as if to say: Here we are, trying to have a serious moral discussion about torture, and this right-wing nut has to bring abortion into it. I’m not so naïve as to have thought there would be no pro-choicers there — but I think I know now what it feels like to have someone read you out of a moral community, even when you’re acting in good faith.

So yes, it’s important to hear Marc Thiessen’s view, expressed as well as he can express it. Only by understanding it can we start to move toward what I hope will be a happier chapter in our nation’s history.

UPDATE: Thanks to all the readers who have written. Most of them have pointed out that Marc does not consider waterboarding to be torture, and therefore cannot be a torture advocate; many have gone on to demand that I offer my own definition of torture. My response is that there were many definitions of torture in existence before the current controversy, definitions under which waterboarding would have been considered torture. But instead of trying to find a definition, and to get everyone to agree to it, I ask myself the following, about any given interrogation practice: “If agents of Fidel Castro’s regime, or of China’s laogai, engaged in this activity, would I condemn it as torture?” That, I think, is the wisest course, because asking this question prevents me from endorsing acts that might be evil simply because it may be in my own self-protective interest (as an American who doesn’t want to be injured or killed in a terrorist attack) to do so. I do not question Marc Thiessen’s sincerity in asserting that waterboarding is not torture. I say merely that I would question my own sincerity were I personally to make that assertion.