The Right’s Anti-Koh Letter

I’d long wondered what, exactly, the “Center for Ethics and Public Policy” is. After reading the letter Dave Weigel found “that John Fonte of the Ethics and Public Policy Center is passing around conservative circles, collecting signatures to oppose the nomination of Harold Koh” I suppose we can see at least part of the answer, namely that they’re applying “ethics” to “public policy” through the advocacy of torture, aggressive war, and impeding efforts to bring war criminals to justice.

The official purpose of the CEPP, though, is to “clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy issues.” Obviously, this is a broader issue than Koh or John Fonte, but as a secular person who thinks there’s a lot of wisdom in traditional Christian ethical thought it always strikes me as very odd that modern-day manifestations of Christian political activism in the United States so often take the form of advocacy for violence, cruelty, and revenge.