Because I care very much

Sarah Palin. Again.

No matter how much rope we give her to hang herself or how often she uses it, she keeps coming back to get more rope. She’s like Jed Cooper in “Hang ‘Em High.” She just won’t go away. Clint would be proud.

The former governor’s latest bout with verbal diarrhea: comparing the torture technique of waterboarding to the Christian sacrament of baptism.

In her speech at the 2014 National Rifle Association annual meeting, Ms. Palin called out liberals for going too easy on terrorists, and that if we had stronger leaders they would “put the fear of God in our enemies.” She went on to say, “They [terrorists] obviously have information on plots to carry out jihad. Oh, but you can’t offend them, can’t make them feel uncomfortable, not even a smidgen. Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.”

This statement got the largest cheer in a speech interrupted many times by cheers.

Conservative and liberal Christians in a rare show of solidarity soundly denounced Ms. Palin for these comments. And rightly so.

Baptism, for Christians, is a sacred event. It marks the beginning of our life in the Body of Christ. For Catholics and many Protestants it is one of the sacraments, meaning that it is an ordinary means by which God’s grace is offered through the act of baptism. For evangelicals, baptism is a symbol of a new life, our rebirth, and a choice to follow the way of Christ. It is the figurative washing away of our sins and rising from death to life. Whether you are introduced to a Christian community through baby baptism or believers’ baptism, it’s seal on your soul bearing witness that you belong to God.

So you must understand, as a Christian who values my baptism, I find it painful to hear Ms. Palin say that, were she in charge, torture would be a form of this sacrament, this holy symbol of God’s grace.

Gratefully, she is not in charge. And of course, she can say whatever she wishes to say. She has that right, even if she’s willing to deny this right to others. (See my blog “Free to Be…”)

When our founders ratified the Constitution, I can only assume that they believed the Right to Free Speech would be a self-correcting privilege. They must have figured that most rational adults would consider the words coming out of their mouths prior to saying them; and should they not consider their words, the condemnation of the majority would either make the offenders reconsider their words or it would silence them.

Clearly James Madison and the Constitutional Convention did not envision Sarah Palin.

However, for all her bravado, and she has bravado in bulk, it is not Ms. Palin’s words that concern me so much. It’s the cheers.

Ms. Palin was speaking at the NRA’s annual, national meeting. As of last year, the NRA has over five million members – all of them armed. The NRA calls itself the largest civil rights organization in the world. And yet, their members are cheering not only the denial of rights to those they consider their enemies, they are cheering the torture of human beings.

This gives me great pause. Because you see, at any give moment there are thousands and thousands of Sarah Palin-types in the world: charismatic speakers, jonesin’ to get some real power to exercise very radical ideas in order to shape the world to their ideology. These would-be rulers of the free world usually have a following, but most of them don’t cause much of a ripple in our larger culture, because a small audience isn’t enough to bolster them to power. They need the consent of the larger populace. In the end, they usually die off or they find a nice little patch of land in Guyana or Waco.

But every now and then, Sarah Palin-types find a foothold. When morale is low, they strike a nerve, exploit a fear, and their audience builds. And if no one else cares or takes them seriously, their little following can create roots strong enough to lead a nation down a path it never intended to go. A minority of zealots against an apathetic majority is a scary proposition.

So while Ms. Palin might try to brush off her offensive comparison to baptism as a joke; and while Sean Hannity supports her remarks that torture is the American answer to our foreign ills; and while millions of armed, self-proclaimed Christians in my country exercise their freedom to cheer her on in spite of many scriptural pleas to love our enemies – I’ll be watching from the sidelines.

Because I care. I care very much.