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“Well, obviously, 18, 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often, and that’s what’s occurred here,” Perry explained. “When you’re in war — and history kind of backs up. There’s a picture of General Patton doing basically the same thing in the Rhine River. Although there’s not a picture, Churchill did the same thing on the Siegfried line.” He continues by stating “what’s really disturbing to me is the over-the-top rhetoric from this administration and their disdain for the military, it appears. Whether it’s the Secretary of State or whether it’s the Secretary of Defense. I mean, these kids made a mistake. There’s not any doubt about it — shouldn’t have done it. It’s bad — but to call it a criminal act, I think, is over-the-top.”

Governor Perry, while I commend you for historically accurate facts (yes, Michele Bachmann, I’m looking at you) the last time I checked, urinating in a river does not equate urinating on a corpse. I don’t even know if I should try to list out reasons why they’re not equivalent because it seems so blatantly obvious to me.

If you really, really need a set of reasons why, here’s my first thought -- that dead corpse who was urinated on? Well, it used to be a human being. Which means it used to be a breathing, living form of life. Which also means that at one point in life, it was conceived and formed in a woman’s stomach for at least nine months. Yeah, rivers are great. In fact, rivers were the basis of a prosperous water source in ancient civilization (the Nile River in Ancient Egypt, the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers in Mesopotamia...how would we have survived without water?). Rivers are essential to the continuation of human existence. Rivers are multifunctional and handy beyond measure. Yet to compare a human life to a river is like comparing an ant to an aquamarine, a bird to a bush, a cat to a cloud. The point is it’s an absolutely ridiculous and invalid comparison.

These acts committed by four Marines may be a little childish, a lot inhumane, unspeakably uncivilized, but out of all the adjectives I can name it is for sure a criminal act.

The Geneva Convention, which is the code of military justice, forbids desecration of dead bodies. They made a mistake, a stupid and immature mistake, but mistakes and punishment tend to go hand in hand. You make a mistake, a big enough one, and you will get punished. And Governor Rick Perry, I thought 18 and 19 year olds were legally adults and should be tried as adults. You seem to suggest that at 18, 19, these “kids” who are legally adults under the law should be granted a lesser form of punishment instead. Therefore, to call for sufficient punishment, and not just a reprimand (what does Perry think is a decent form of reprimand for “kids” anyway? A slap on the wrist, taking away television privileges?) is not over-the-top in any sense in two ways: firstly, because international law has dictated so, and second, because these Marines are not juvenile delinquents - they are legal adults. They are Marines representing the nation to restore peace and tranquility to a third world, and instead, they have become the third world, and that deserves punishment.

What Perry thinks is disdain for the military is ill conceived and faulty. It is not disdain for the military that the public is outraged against. It is disdain for the people who decided to stoop as low as their enemies. Long gone should be the days of an eye for an eye philosophy of punishment. We no longer feel that is acceptable to cut off someone’s hands if they had stolen something, to cut off their tongues for lying or slander, or to break someone’s foot if they break yours.

The Taliban have committed atrocious crimes on humanity themselves -- that is without a doubt. But to stoop to their levels of inhumanity and cruelty reflects even worse on a nation that preaches civilization time after time-- it shows signs of hypocrisy. This is not a condemnation of the military by any means, but they are the ones who have the opportunity, again and again, to be the bigger and better people, to step up and embody what America is supposed to embody. Unfortunately, they didn’t step up. And that’s where the disdain is.

Yes, this is war. Yes, the enemy doesn’t play by the rules. But just because they don’t play by the rules doesn’t mean we don’t have to either. In the United States, human rights, even the human rights of a deceased person, should be abided by. And when we don’t, we come off as hypocrites.