Many Americans stand with President Bush on virtually everything simply because he is a self-declared Christian, a once wayward man miraculously turned prayerful.

"The Lord has just blessed him," televangelist Pat Robertson once gushed about Bush, summing up the apparent beliefs of millions. "... It doesn't make any difference what he does, good or bad, God picks him up because he's a man of prayer and God's blessing him."

Wow. Must be nice. And you certainly wouldn't want to criticize God's anointed leader on Earth, would you?

I guess that explains the deafening silence of the president's minions when it comes to torture. President Bush has said, time and again, that he does not support torture. But as is his wont, his deeds make a liar of him.

On Oct. 5, the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate voted 90-9 in favor of Sen. John McCain's anti-torture amendment to a defense appropriations bill. But Bush has threatened to use the first veto of his presidency to kill the entire bill (which pays soldiers' salaries and funds the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) because he opposes the provision to ban the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" by the military, in accordance with the U.S. Army Field Manual.

This is as much about protecting U.S. personnel as anything. If we resort to cruel and inhumane treatment, we hand our enemies a dangerous excuse to torture our soldiers when they are captured.

But Bush swats away such practical concerns. Evidently, God has told him that torturing other human beings is fine as long as you are born-again, which is all that seems to matter to some evangelical Christians. Hey, the Crusaders and witch-burners and slave holders did it, right?

This is a revolting distortion of what our Christian president's savior stood for. Sure, Jesus ripped the moneychangers in the temple and offered the occasional inconsistent message ("For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against his mother...," Matthew 10:35), but torture?

The only person tortured in the Gospels is Jesus himself, and it wasn't pretty. Ask "Goremaster" Mel Gibson.

When the president (and his faithful lieutenants, including Colorado U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, one of the nine loyal lapdogs who voted against the McCain amendment) suggests that torture is a necessary response to the threat of terrorism, I wonder if he remembers what Jesus told a disciple at Gethsemane: "Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword."

Anyone who argues that Jesus would advocate torture is torturing the scriptures for immoral ends. As incredulous people are now asking, Who Would Jesus Torture?

Allard, meanwhile, recently told the Daily Camera editorial board that there's been no torture or ill treatment of detainees in the "war on terror"; it's all good, he says. This from a man who boasts on his Web site, "I have worked closely with my colleagues and the current administration to spread democracy and prevent human rights violations worldwide, regardless of people's political, ethnic, or religious affiliation."

Who Would Jesus Deceive?

When the leaders we choose say it's OK to torture anyone we like, and destroy whole cities in vengeance (Fallujah, including women, elders and children, in retribution for the murders of four American mercenaries — the president should reread that whole "eye for an eye" passage) while claiming the mantle of Jesus, we roam the same level of earthly Hell as terrorists who proclaim that Allah urges them to slaughter innocents.

Contact Clay Evans at (303) 473-1352 or evansc@dailycamera.com.

Copyright 2005, The Daily Camera and Boulder Publishing, LLC.

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