From The Seattle Times
By Johann N. Neem

Democracy is premised on a simple claim: All people, by virtue of their humanity, are entitled to respect and to be treated with basic dignity. This is why Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers believed that all people are born equal and have the same natural rights.

To be endowed with these natural rights means that being human is enough to warrant respect. Some will get rich, some will be poor. Some will become famous, others will not. But all our inequalities take place within a larger equality, our shared humanity.

Those who advocate torture are fundamentally endangering democracy. Some have said that we must balance freedom against security, that in certain situations torture is justifiable to protect Americans from impending threats.

According to The New York Times, the CIA recently told Congress that it may engage in illegal interrogation methods in order to prevent a terrorist attack. But there is no way to engage in torture and to protect American democracy. America’s core premise is that all men — today we would say people — are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

The decline of torture and the rise of democracy were historically connected, as historian Lynn Hunt demonstrates in her recent book, “Inventing Human Rights” (2007). Only when we could respect the innate dignity of all people could democracy emerge. And we learned to respect others when we learned that other people’s sufferings — their pain and agony — were similar to ours.

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