Andrew Sullivan

What gay culture is before it is anything else, before it is a culture of desire or a culture of subversion or a culture of pain, is a culture of friendship.

— Andrew Sullivan

My own early crusade for same-sex marriage, for example, is now mainstream gay politics. It wasn't when I started.

— Andrew Sullivan

Today's age of politicized and intolerant Christianism seems to me to be one of those moments when Christianity has estranged itself most thoroughly from the priorities and spirit of its founder. But this will pass. Christianity will survive Christianism. Some true followers of Jesus will recover their faith from Caesar's grip at some point.

— Andrew Sullivan

First silence. Then denial. Then support of the insupportable. Then vilification of the dissenters. The pattern is as old as time.

— Andrew Sullivan

It is not an opinion that "enhanced interrogation techniques" are torture. It is a legal fact. And it is also a legal fact that the president is a war criminal.

— Andrew Sullivan

Any president can start a war, and use the chaos of disorder that such a war creates as an indefinite argument for prolonging it. It's a war that keeps on giving. Failure means it's even more necessary to keep failing.

— Andrew Sullivan

The one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.

— Andrew Sullivan

When you fuse Christianity with power, it isn't long before Christians start imposing the cross on others rather than taking it up for themselves.

— Andrew Sullivan

When Bush says that Abu Ghraib was the work of a few, he forgot to mention that he was one of them.

— Andrew Sullivan

If you suspend the Geneva Conventions, give the green light to anything that will get intelligence, round up thousands all over the globe with reckless disregard for guilt or innocence, you are effectively and knowingly issuing orders to seize innocent people and torture them. Any president who decides to do that and then says it was not his intention to do that is a fraud or a fool.

— Andrew Sullivan

If the enemy tortures, it defines their moral evil and all intelligence gleaned from such coercion is self-evidently false propaganda. If we do it, it isn't wrong, and it leads to good intelligence.Got that? And these people have the gall to describe their ideological opponents as moral relativists.

— Andrew Sullivan

If religion is about truth, why is it so afraid of error?

— Andrew Sullivan

What modernity requires is not that you cease living according to your faith, but that you accept that others may differ and that therefore politics requires a form of discourse that is reasonable and accessible to believer and non-believer alike. This religious restraint in politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal democracy.

— Andrew Sullivan

I like the pluralism of modernity; it doesn't threaten me or my faith. And if one's faith is dependent on being reinforced in every aspect of other people's lives, then it is a rather insecure faith, don't you think?

— Andrew Sullivan

A true conservative — who is, above all, an anti-ideologue — will often be attacked for alleged inconsistency, for changing positions, for promising change but not a radical break with the past, for pursuing two objectives — like liberty and authority, or change and continuity — that seem to all ideologues as completely contradictory.

— Andrew Sullivan

Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.

— Andrew Sullivan

The forces going on in the society are not things the media can prevent or change. But we can and should help understand this crisis and warn against false solutions. If feelings are trumping arguments — the pun is fully intended — it doesn’t mean that arguments don’t still have to be made. It may not win the news cycle. It may not even win this election cycle. But it’s a critical task.

— Andrew Sullivan