Why Sarah Palin is right about baptism by waterboarding

In a speech now heard ’round the Christian world, Sarah Palin said at an NRA rally that “waterboarding is how we’d baptize terrorists” if she were president.

Christians were up in arms about the apparent blasphemy of the statement, shocked that she would sacrilegiously connect waterboarding with the Christian sacrament of baptism. It taps into a long, shameful legacy of Christianity that forced baptism on people of other faiths under threat of violence, and it contorts the Christian faith with nationalism in ways that make my own stomach churn.

But as Christians we seemed less outraged that Palin would consider waterboarding a viable method of interrogation rather than as a method of torture, as fellow priest the Rev. Daniel Brereton pointed out.