Wanting universal health care is progressive. Very 1927.
Wanting an end to discrimination is 1863 and 1963. Very 1923, 1967, and 2003.
Wanting an end to enforcement of religious morals by law is 1973, and 2003 again.
Wanting sane financial regulation is 1934, from having seen 1929.
Vikingkingq has an excellent diary up at the moment making a similar point: that to be progressive today, you've got a very solid head start just with FDR.
Opposition to torture is different. It cannot be called progressive. It is too 1215 for that. You don't need medieval latin to keep up to speed on the health care debate.
What we have, in a system of justice based on confession under torture, in a system of trial by ordeal, is the Middle Ages walking amongst us. Somehow being taken serious in its views. Allowed to set up its hangings in chains and its water tortures. The brutality of its practices excused from the law. The senselessness of its thoughts allowed to write OpEds in the newspapers.
Because torture tests an accused's capacity to endure pain, not his veracity, innocent persons might yield to the pain and torment and confess things they never did.
That is from Joost Damhouder, circa 1560. He was influential on the legal thought of his day, about the proper technique for the interrogation of witches. He was a strong proponent of our current technique of frequent body cavity searches for contraband. If Joost was going to publish his opinions about torture in a modern day OpEd, he would first have to tone down the language a bit. Sixteenth Century opinion on the matter is too much for us.
In 1497, Girolamo Savonarola was strung from a rope and jerked up and down to extract a confession. History remembers the awfulness of it, and objects.
In 2004, Khaled al-Maqtari got the same treatment. At Abu Ghraib, we jerked him up and down from chains. History will not remember him. The political progress is that Savonarola was then burned at the stake. Al-Maqtari was merely sent to a string of unimaginably nightmarish prisons.
The point of this diary is not to argue against the use of torture. That debate was settled long long ago.
The point is to say that any modern progressive politics has unfortunately also got to add in an unprogressive bit, and recognize it as such, about putting a stop to our pre-1211 shit.