>>>Sure, tickle his feet all you want, but don't start ripping out his nails. The truth is that torture has been shown over and over to be an unreliable method of obtaining valid information. It says more about the torturer than the victim afaic.
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>>Of course you're right. I do, however, see parallels to the moral absolutism that invades the anti-terrorism debate and that found in issues of reproduction.
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>I think I need more information. I'm having trouble drawing a parallel.
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>>It would seem anti-abortion sentiment should be quite pro contraception. But the same token, anti-torture advocates should encourage wire-tapping and other non-violent means of obtaining the information otherwise to be extracted by force. No?
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>Except for the Catholic Church, isn't it the case that anti-abortion folks are pro-contraception? I have no real information to back that up, but for whatever reason, it seems to me that it's true. With regard to the Catholic Church, however, the real issue for them is to get as many followers as possible, and that requires that families have more and more children. I honestly believe it's less about morality for them than it is about having more tithers.
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The problem seems to be that many "pro-life" people seems to think that contraception encourages S-E-X ( and as any Southern Baptist will tell you - if done standing up, that can lead to *dancing* ! )

>I have no problem with wire tapping etc, just as long as it's carried out with regard to the individual freedoms we crow about to the rest of the world. That means court orders etc showing a probable cause for the intrusion. Otherwise, there is still the problem of maintaing the life and culture that supposedly your country (and ours) are fighting for. If individual freedoms are not the epitome of western culture, then what the heck are we fighting and dying for - just the right to increase wealth and to spy on our neighbours (not the loftiest of goals afaic).

I completely agree. But the debate gets very clouded in that both data mining of call patterns without regard to content and tapping foreign transmissions have been incorrectly portrayed as 'spying on US citizens in their homes' which is just not the case. there is already very strict legal control over domestic surveillance and I don't think there is serious debate about loosening that.