While speaking at the NRA Convention last weekend, Sarah Palin said that if she was president, waterboarding would be “how we baptize terrorists.” Predictably, Bryan Fischer came to her defense on his radio show today, saying that Palin was just being “cute” and “clever and funny,” mainly because “waterboarding it not torture.”
Bizarrely, Fischer insisted that waterboarding is nothing like pulling out fingernails or shocking people with a car battery precisely because people are willing to undergo waterboarding in order to demonstrate that it is torture.
As Fischer sees it, if waterboarding really was torture, then nobody would ever volunteer to be subjected to it. Since people have done so, Fischer argued, then it must not be “real torture.”
As such, people who are outraged by what Palin said “ought to just kind of lighten up just a little bit”:
