Stop Rape: A WWII Chaplain’s Advice
By Ronit Y. Stahl
During this week’s oral arguments on California’s Prop 8, Justice Samuel Alito questioned whether the court could take a stand on gay marriage, which, he claimed, was “newer than cell phones or the internet.” Questionable logic aside, Alito’s insistence that wariness represents the appropriate response to any sort of “new” arrangement of sexual politics attracted attention because, well, a Supreme Court Justice articulated it. But this assumption of novelty is neither surprising nor new. Just a few weeks ago, in the wake of the Steubenville rape case verdict, calls to make men responsible for preventing rape received comparable treatment as outlandish, unstudied, and improvident. In other words, instructing men not to rape represented a reckless, “new” idea that might alter social norms in unprecedented and thus terrifying ways.
