Matt and Kristin in the Philippines

In January 2006, our president signed the McCain Amendment which explicitly prohibits cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment by ALL US personnel - no exceptions.

This past week, the administration pushed for legislation to amend both the McCain and War Crimes Act so that CIA personnel would be "exempt" from these clearly stated policies.

I am currently taking a class entitled Ministry, Spirituality, and Survivors of Human Rights Abuses. Our second reading assignment is the memoir of an American nun, kidnapped in Guatemala, tortured for 24 hours and managed to escape. Thousands of Guatemalans were not so fortunate. They were burned, raped, mutilated, stabbed, electrocuted, there is no end to a tormentor's choice of methods.

Thousands of Filipinos continue to be persecuted and tortured in their struggle for justice. Our brothers and sisters around the world are silenced for their demands for basic needs, clean water, sanitation, fair wages, land. And they are consistently denied and systematically killed.

We don't see that violence here, not the targeted gunning down of men, women and children fighting to stay alive and to provide a better life for their families. They're not communists, they're not rebel armies; they're farmers, fisherfolk, mothers, and fathers imagining a world where justice exists and is practiced.

We have seen bullet holes in palm trees, houses strafed by machine guns, the gaping wounds in the earth of bombs, the bench where a grandmother was tied, tortured, and shot while her grandson witnessed from a distance. A cross hung on the wall in her house. We have heard the stories of a boy, orphaned by the dual killing of his parents, we listened as he demanded justice for his parents' death.

We have seen the photgraphs from Abu Ghraib.

We have heard of family members "disappeared" and most often killed, some are released and never recover from the trauma.

Friends, people are dying. Our people are dying. They are dying for infringing on the power and control of insecure governments and administrations.

I urge you to take action. The PCUSA submitted a petition denouncing the above-mentioned amendment. You can visit cvt.org (Center for Victims of Torture) and sign an online petition that will be sent to your local representatives.

We must use our voices for the people who can no longer speak, for the assassinated, the disappeared, the tortured. We have that power where others only have fear.

Let us stand together in solidarity with our global family and affirm that peace will never be acheived through violence and the degradation of humanity but through love, nonviolence,persistence and an end to silence.

"Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams."
- Dorothy Day