On Saturday night, Rick Warren asked John McCain if evil exists. McCain said yes and told Warren: “Not long ago in Baghdad, Al Qaeda took two young women who were mentally disabled and put suicide vests on them, sent them into a marketplace, and by remote control, detonated those suicide vests. If that isn’t evil, you have to tell me what is.” Politico‘s Ben Smith writes that McCain’s story is “questionable” because original reports that the women had Down Syndrome weren’t substantiated by medical records. But those same medical records, cited in the New York Times story that Smith links to, reported that the women were schizophrenics. Is strapping suicide vests on women suffering from schizophrenia any less evil than blowing up women with Down Syndrome? Or does schizophrenia not count as a mental disability?
