The context of Andrew Sullivan's little outburst will be clear if you are a regular denizen of CNN land. If not the background is the debate raging over the use of harsh interrogation techniques against terrorists. The quote is taken from his piece titled Jesus Wept.
"One wonders how many times evangelical preachers have inveighed against the evil of someone like me getting a civil marriage license compared with acts of cruelty inflicted on defenseless human beings in American custody. But one also sees the impact of a Catholic hierarchy more exercized on these social issues than on a categorical evil defended proudly by a former vice-president".
Now what has set him off is a Pew survey that purports to correlate Church attendance with support for torture.Andrew Sullivan
According to Pew's figures 19% of non-Hispanic Catholics, 18% of White evangelical Protestants, 15% of White mainline Protestants and 15% of the unaffiliated think torture can be often justified.
Just why Pew thought it necessary to try and find a correlation between support for torture and religious adherence remains a mystery. Well not really, the only mystery is that if Pew's figures had come out the other way ie showing the secular more likely to support torture than the religious whether or not CNN would have run with it.
As it happens I share the good Mr Sullivan's disquiet over waterboarding. However I am not about to kid myself that the people who were subject to this treatment were anything other than extremely dangerous individuals with mass murder in their hearts. And I also recognize that whether or not this constitutes torture is a legitimate matter for debate.
In any case the oddest thing about all of this is that if the people who are currently languishing in "gitmo" were to get their way people "like" Andrew Sullivan will have a lot more to loose than conservative Christians ever will.
And I don't think that civil marriage licenses for "someone like" him are part of their agenda either.