“Torture” — the new “racism”

If waterboarding, a procedure we inflicted on our own troops, can be considered torture, I suppose that almost anything one doesn’t approve of can be so deemed. And given the proven effectiveness of throwing the term torture around, the temptation to apply it to anything one doesn’t approve of must be difficult for the intellectually dishonest to resist.

Thus, sure enough, we find U.N. bureaucrats attempting to define “torture” in the healthcare context. The results are predictable. Wesley Smith informs us that a special report to the U.N. views laws outlawing abortion as torture. And, naturally, the intellectual rot doesn’t stop there:

Other policy disputes are also inflated into torture, e.g., laws requiring sex change surgery before legal sex reassignment, laws that permit a parent to lose custody of a child solely because they use drugs, and mandatory HIV testing for. . .“sex workers.”

“Racism” used to be the left’s favorite discussion-ending epithet; now it has a rival in “torture.” Can it be long before U.N. bureaucrats will press to label Zionism torture?

Smith concludes:

This is the direction in which the internationalists want to take us. And if it means that the true horror of torture is watered down by including laws, actions or omissions that aren’t “torture” properly understood, well that’s just the cost of using international law to destroy national sovereignty in the cause of imposing the ruling class’s morality throughout the world.

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