I first read this post by dad29 yesterday (via Jay) and it frankly made me so upset, that I posted a very restrained comment, and then decided I couldn't post here for at least a day until I calmed down.  Of course, re-reading that post, along with his follow up (also via Jay), has me very angry again.  The subject is women in the military, and the current statistics regarding incidents of rape between male and female members of the military:

The scope of the problem was brought into acute focus for me during a visit to the West Los Angeles VA Healthcare Center, where I met with female veterans and their doctors. My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41% of female veterans seen at the clinic say they were victims of sexual assault while in the military, and 29% report being raped during their military service.

So?

This isn't shocking, this is entirely predictable. It was predicted, as it was one of the many reasons that sane individuals have opposed women serving in the military from the very start.

Fact: Women do NOT belong in the military. Sure, some have been heroic--but that's merely playing percentages. After all, some men have been heroic, too.

In his follow up post, dad29 states the following:

So with the case of "females in the military." That happens to be an attempt to contradict nature, and the consequences were laid out in lavender in the (linked) supporting news story.

"Conservatives" who object to the post clearly accept as 'normative' the militarization of women, which is the direct cause of using quotation marks when characterizing their philosophical bent.

Liberals are so blinded (or intellectually bereft) that they actually see the post as some sort of endorsement of assault.

Frankly I don't know where to begin with this.  On its face, dad29's original post, and even his follow up seem to express the idea that it's the woman's fault for being raped because she chose to join the military.  He denies this in the follow up, and also in various comment threads, but I just can't read his posts and not come up with very much of an alternate theory.

The real problem is that he chose a poor proxy argument.  dad29 clearly thinks women don't belong in the military for various reasons.  So when he saw a new item which talked about a problem regarding women in the military, he decided it was another good data point to use.  The problem is that the "issue" he decided to use is one that has significant moral repercussions.  By suggesting that the rape of women is reason to keep them out of the military implicitly says various things which are damning of dad29 personally, which he makes no real effort to refute, and in some ways are strengthened by his follow on post.

First it suggests that the rape is somehow justified by their being there.  This idea is what I find most highly offensive.  His follow on post which somehow suggests that some sort of natural law made this all predictable is disgusting at best.  Men do not rape women.  Monsters rape women.  The entire premise of his post suggests that the military is filled with monsters instead of heroes serving their country.  It also suggests that being in the military, and sacrificing certain things because of it, excuses rape somehow.

I should also point out that I find it amusing for a devout Catholic to argue that somehow these individuals don't have free will (the ultimate gift from God) to choose good acts over evil acts, and that somehow the nature of men and women in closer quarters makes it inevitable.  Of course, this small amount of amusement is vastly overwhelmed by my moral disgust.  There is never an excuse for rape.  And this entire discussion wreaks of making excuses for it.  Next we'll see dad29 suggesting that women in the Middle East who don't wear the hijab deserve to be stoned to death, because they violated some sort of natural law regarding the place of women in that society, and after all, what did they expect to happen?

There is no natural law that makes rape acceptable.  People have the freedom to choose whether to respect women or not, and those who choose not to should be punished to the greatest extent of the law.  Suggesting that men are not capable of doing this ought to offend the sensibility and morality of every good man on this Earth.  Suggesting that men in the military are incapable of doing this sullies the reputation of people who rightly should be considered heroes in this country.  Just the very idea that someone who is serving to protect this country would choose to violate and harm a fellow service member (nay, citizen), and that somehow this is to be expected?!  It boggles my mind.  The fact that these actions seem to be condoned by the military brass is shocking.  What needs to be investigated are those cover ups, not the fact that women are there in the first place.  After all, if you remove women from the military without looking at the cover ups regarding rape investigations, would dad29 find rapes by servicemen against civilian populations where the military is posted to be acceptable and expected?

The true folly with the proxy argument is that the debate argues different things.  dad29 is really arguing that women shouldn't be in the military, while all the people arguing with him are arguing the rape of women in the military.  These are entirely two different topics.  So while they argue that rape is wrong, he argues that women in the military is wrong, and everyone mistakes one argument for the other.  I'm probably doing the same thing.  But by creating such a poor proxy argument in the first place, dad29 deserves every bit of flack he is getting.  Rape is always wrong.  Period.  Tying it's occurrence to some other result you think is desirable is just plain stupid.

Emily Mills has a much more rationally written, and less angry post on all of this that is also worth reading.