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Polls that actually matter

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As the new Pew poll causes the right wing of the blogosphere to start flinging their poo again, it’s worth recalling that polls reveal all kinds of nutty — and genuinely consequential — beliefs.

It tells us little, obviously, that X percentage of Muslims in America can find “justification” for suicide bombings under unspecified conditions; it tells us quite a bit more, by contrast, that X percentage of Americans support arbitrary executive power, including indefinite detention and torture (about which our president sees fit to brag in public.)

So if we’re discussing the relationship between belief and action, there’s scarier shit than this. As Greenwald notes:

majorities of white Christians want to torture not merely actual terrorists, but they also want to torture “terrorist suspects” as well, i.e., a group that almost certainly includes perfectly innocent people.

And majorities of white Christians — Catholics, evangelicals and protestants — believe in torture not merely in the improbable-in-the-extreme “ticking time bomb” scenario; rather, they believe in torture as a matter of course (i.e., more than “rarely” — either “often or “sometimes”). (By stark and revealing contrast, “secularists” oppose torture in far greater numbers). Think about how depraved that is: what kind of religious individual affirmatively believes that people should be routinely tortured, including people who have never been proven to have done anything wrong?

And — to cite a recent poll that Greenwald doesn’t mention — what kind of soldier would “justify” torture and the mistreatment of civilians? Apparently quite a few. And given that the number of Americans who authorize, oversee, and rationalize the actual torture of actual human beings is greater — by roughly an infinite factor — than the number of Muslim Americans who have organized and carried out suicide attacks anywhere in the world, I’m quite comfortable saving my outrage for another day.

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