Where did you sleep last night?
I hope you haven’t missed The Guardian today, where Terry Jones lays out the current administration’s definition of torture – and what it means for the future of parenting.
What this means in understandable English is that if a parent, in his anxiety to know where his son goes after choir practice, does something that will cause severe pain to his son, it is only “torture” if the causing of that severe pain is his objective. If his objective is something else – such as finding out where his son goes after choir practice – then it is not torture....
In fact, the report went further. It said, if a parent “has a good-faith belief [that] his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture”. So all you’ve got to do to avoid accusations of child abuse is to say that you didn’t think it would cause any lasting harm to the child. Easy peasy!
I currently have a lot of my son’s friends locked up in the garage, and I’m applying electrical charges to their genitals and sexually humiliating them in order to get them to tell me where my son goes after choir practice.
Classic.