A while back, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek article endorsing rape in a mocking manner for the annual Student Life Libel Issue. It never was published because I submitted it too late, but I have a feeling it would have been a difficult piece to publish anyway. In retrospect, however, it raises an interesting point. The entire purpose of the article was to show how endorsing rape is absolutely absurd and indefensible. We live in a society that encourages debate, and yet arguing whether rape is acceptable is very much not for debate—and for good reason, because the position is indefensible. Nobody can justify such a horrific act, and nobody ought to justify such a horrific act. I appreciate this view in society because we shouldn’t even have to get to the point of debating rape—we’ve progressed past that point to where we pretty much have universal rejection of rape as in any way defensible from a moral standpoint. This is good—but why hasn’t it happened for torture?

In a society where we’ve made such progress that we’re able to reject rape, why are we still debating torture? If somebody took a stance for rape and made a genuine appeal to society to start allowing the rape of any persons, that somebody’s stance would be immediately rejected and that somebody would be booed off and shunned from society, and rightfully so. However, when somebody makes an appeal for torturing some individuals, we actually contend that stance and make arguments against that person, in what seems to be a contradiction. While rape and torture aren’t immediately up for conflation, they’re both heinous acts that are cruel, inhuman and worthy of punishment to the highest degree possible. Nevertheless, we continue to debate torture as if a stance could be taken that involves torturing others. The claim that torture is necessary never applied to the My Lai Massacre, the Rape of Nanking or any other historical event that achieved some political or military goal at the expense of drastically harming others in a brutal, painful, and extended fashion. Even setting that aside, would we allow detainees to be raped instead of tortured? The very notion sounds horribly strange, and yet the same does not apply for torture. It seems we don’t hold the same level of disgust for such a disgusting act, and it’s not readily clear why. For now, anyway, I can only hope that we will eventually reach the point in society where we look back and think of the contradiction in what we allow and disallow in discourse.