Campaign against torture gears up to lobby Obama

An extensive network of religious leaders, including an Atlanta Baptist leader, will begin a lobbying campaign to get President-elect Barack Obama to issue an executive order banning torture as one of his first acts Wednesday.

The Bush administration’s approval of interrogation techniques such as water boarding inspired the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. David Gushee, a Baptist teacher of ethics at Mercer University, has played a key role in the campaign, organizing a national conference on torture in Atlanta Sept. 11 and pushing it as an issue among evangelicals.

Wednesday, the campaign, which says it has the support of 240 religious groups from various faiths, will begin visiting congressmen in Washington to push for the ban and for a congressional investigation into the use of torture by Americans on fighters and others captured in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror.

Kyndra Frazier, an Emory divinity student who has helped organize students, said she got involved for moral and practical reasons.

“I don’t believe we would want those things used on U.S. soldiers,” she said.