Those who prefer their power unrestrained by wisdom are using pushback. They are advocating the legalization of torture as a sort of eye for an eye response to the liberal destruction of their patriarchal system.
Somewhere deep down we all know that if you fail to enforce a law it ceases to be a law. It gets downgraded like the Sunday Blue laws, speed limits, and all the so called victimless crimes. We have purposely downgraded the laws we don't approve of, especially those related to institutionalized morality.
Those who think this is a christian nation under some kind of Mosaic law which makes sodomy, abortion and the use of stem cells abominations, have been bitch slapped by liberal decriminalizations of their common law moral codes that go back to the bronze age.
Decriminalizing torture is a pushback to the rock in the box, the law carved in stone, housed in an ark and the ark placed in a sanctuary where it can't be disturbed by calls for justice.
Where we have been engaged in taking away the right to demand an eye for an eye, they see us and our civil and human rights as immoral, despite their being attributed to a gift from our creator whom they assume to be the god they worship.
Things like the Magna Carta and the Constitution whose ages are measured in centuries rather than millenia they see as newfangled experiments rather than hallowed and ancient principals.
From their perspective we pushed for the a woman's right to vote, and then because women are always weak and never strong we got uppity going for the legalization of marijuanna, the decriminalization of sex, a woman's right to chose, and limits on a man's right to dominate and kill everything that walks and crawls.
How dare we.
They see this as dangerous territory. For us its hard to even get our heads to a place where we can see the essence of the argument, but for some people, not just Right Wing Christians, but people of the book, Mother Nature is suspect and weak because she's pagan and matriarchal and cares about the nature of people as well as gods.
The people of the book, Christian, Jewish and Muslim have a personified patriarchal god that doesn't like being reminded that he has a consort let alone that the role of his consort is to temper his power with her wisdom.
They see it as an eye for an eye that when it comes to legalizing torture instead of marijuana its our bleeding heart, tree hugging, humanistic sensibilities that are being outraged.