Is it missing the point to take offense at Sarah Palin's reference to baptism?

So, Sarah Palin said this thing the other day about waterboarding and baptism. I wouldn’t bother bringing it up just to say that I, like so many others, find this disgusting. 

What’s more interesting to me is the diversity of people who are similarly appalled. Lots of right-of-center commentators have called Palin out, Andrew Sullivan and Rod Dreher of course but also Mollie Hemingway, Edward Peters, Patrick Brennan, Joe Carter, and others. Good for them.

Some of these folks focus more on Palin’s flippant attitude toward baptism than on her enthusiasm for torture, and some more liberal commentators see this as misplaced. “We [Christians] seemed more upset about the imagined abuse of a religious ritual than the actual abuse of a human,” writes CCblogger David Henson.