I know when I started reading this article from the religious right propaganda arm that somewhere it was going to imply the women were to blame. And it only took me halfway through the article on rape at military academies to find it.
You see, according to the religious right, we just didn't have the rape of women at military academies until - da da da dum - they let the women-folk in as cadets (yeah, I hear there weren't a lot of lynchings in America until black people arrived either).
Putting aside the implicit women-bashing, my favorite part of the article is the way the religious right just nonchalantly thinks that raping women is somehow a normal consequence of stress, alcohol and proximity. Like all guys do it, you know. Kind of like burping or giving each other high fives.
We see the same attitude from the religious right about pedophilia: Hey, you put some priests together in the same building for a few years, make em take a vow of chastity, and of course they're going to rape kids, wouldn't you? As if somehow any adult would rape a child under the "right" circumstances.
I seriously think the religious right isn't just wrong about sex, but rather, they think differently about sex than the rest of us do. To them, raping women is a normal consequence of the proximity of the sexes, and raping children is something anyone would do under the right circumstances. And perhaps for them this is true. But how sick can you get get?
More from the wonderful AgapePress, publish by - who else? - the rabid American Family Association:
Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Bob Maginnis, a military expert and a graduate of West Point Academy, says he is not surprised by recent reports of a case involving a cadet at the military school who is suspected of raping two female former cadets. This is only the latest in a series of sexual assault incidents reported at the U.S. service academies in recent years. Lonnie Story, the senior cadet facing prosecution for allegedly raping two former cadets while on leave last year, has been charged with two counts of rape under the military code but denies the allegations against him. Maginnis, a West Point alum, notes that similar cases have rocked the Air Force, Naval, and Coast Guard Academies. "All the academies have had sexual assault allegations that have been in the news," he points out, "and that hasn't made them look good. To a certain degree, we didn't have these internal issues nearly as much before we had women at the service academies, which happened in 1976." Although Maginnis acknowledges that, even before 1976, some male cadets undoubtedly committed assault, "but they weren't fellow cadets, and they were charged if the evidence suggested that," he says. But with today's situation," he insists, where "men and women are living together under high-stress conditions as they are at the academies, and you mix in alcohol with these circumstances, then inevitably you're going to have problems." The situation could be addressed, but the military analyst says the ball is in the federal legislature's court for now. The rules Congress has set for the military have "unfortunately ... created a monster," Maginnis contends, "and they're not giving us the tools to correct it. Rather they're pushing in just the opposite direction."
