What is torture? It is forcing a person to do something against their will, by inflicting unbearable pain—such as pressing them until their chest collapses, stretching one on a rack till their torn apart, pulling out their fingernails, inducing electro shock to their sensitive parts, simulating drowning, whipping them till they nearly die of bleeding, lynching them from a tree, nailing them to a cross to die of strangulation. Torture is wrong. Owen Lovejoy said in Congress in Feb. 1858, “Mr. President . . . When you call upon me to keep in step with wild shrieks of human agony, I can not do it. It gates upon my soul like the dissonance of Hell.”

What is wrong about inflicting unbearable pain in order to change another person’s will? In civilized societies, including ours no one has the right to do so. What forces then allow many people to condone it—primarily it is a sense of revenge. Something awful as happened to us or may happen to us which appears to give us the right to torture. But the great religions of the world condemn applying that apparent right. The Bible says, “Revenge is mine saith the Lord” it belongs to no human being without severe consequences. The other force that leads us to condone torture is that someone has the power to inflict it and does. Both revenge and abuse of power don’t work in the long run.

Torture produces many unintended consequences. As horrible was inflicting human suffering is on both the afflicted and the afflicter, there is another terrible consequence of inflicting unbearable pain on others. It tortures our stabilizing social institutions. It bends them out of shape; it forces them to do things against their wills, against their standards of behavior. The press becomes perverted. It forgets to apply its standard qualifier for criminals before conviction. The words “accused” terrorists are easily forgotten, and the President is seldom challenged when he calls them terrorist. The legal system is bent out of shape by finding rationalizations for the abuse of the sacred right of haebeus corpus. And many religious traditions fail to apply the basic teaching that only God in God’s time will bring the consequences for seeking revenge and abusing power instead of seeking to redeem the situation.

Last year I discovered by grandfather eleven generations ago in 1693 was the infamous Rev. Samuel Parris, paranoid pastor of the Congregational Church in Salem Village, Massachusetts. He accused his slave, Tituba, as a witch who inflicted illness on his children. Rev Parris was the one primarily responsible for the deaths of 24 citizens, mostly women, accused of witchcraft by three judges. They hung the women but would put a heavy stone a day on a board on a man’s chest until he confessed he was a witch or died. Years later the citizens of Salem Village and the neighboring villages and towns of Essex County sent a written Remonstrance to the citizens of Massachusetts asking them to vote down their proposed constitution. Why? Because they wanted a check and balance on their government officials, and a separation of the legislative, administrative and judicial powers of government! They won the referendum and the Massachusetts Constitution was changed.

I hope some of my ancestors were part of that Remonstrance, even if they were not I am mighty proud of my ancestors’ neighbors back then, as I am of my neighbors here to tonight for demonstrating against torture. When out inner eye helps us see and our inner ear helps us hear those “wild shrieks of human agony” may it grate upon our souls, may we stand up with loud shouts for human decency.

TORTURE IS WRONG, REVENEGE IS WRONG, ABUSE OF POWER IS WRONG!
TORTURE DOESN’T WORK, REVENEGE DOESN’T WORK,
ABUSE OF POWER DOESN’T WORK!
TORTURE, REVENEGE, ABUSE OF POWER, BENDS OUR SOCIETY OUT OF SHAPE.

Standing up together tonight you have helped bend it back in shape. Thank you. I am proud of each and every one of you!