GoDaddy’s president is free to write whatever he wants at their site:

Close Gitmo? No way!! Think our interrogation methods are tough? Prisoners in the Middle East talk quick. Here’s why.

…And I’m free to shop somewhere where I’m not underwriting political support for torture. The question is… should I?

GoDaddy isn’t its president – although it features its president’s views prominently on the front page of its web site. Registering with them rather than another registrar doesn’t express support for his political views… but it certainly doesn’t express opposition, either.

At what point does dealing with someone whose views I find repellent stop being a question of political tactics, and start being a question of ethics? And at what point do commercial decisions stop being legitimate expressions of disagreement, and start being suppression of free expression?

More on this later.

Update: This is now being discussed at length on Daily Kos, Politology and lots of other sites. (Ironically, this is on the same day that Jeff Partridge reports that GoDaddy has become the top low-cost registrar on the planet.)

Added update: Although he isn’t responding directly to Parsons’ post, Armando at dKos has a bang-on answer to its most appalling passage:

The question should not be ‘are we like these despicable torturers?’ The question must be why are we not different enough from these inhuman monsters?

Final update: MediaGirl alerts us to the constant stream of changes to the original blog post. Parsons now says that the interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay, while not meeting his criteria for torture (although FBI types disagree), are probably ineffective and should be abandoned. Interestingly, he’s come around to that standpoint after hearing from interrogators.