This week, it’s been hard to think of anything but the prison-abuse pictures depicting Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison being stripped naked and forced to engage in real or simulated sexual acts, among other abuses. When we see a photo like this, we don’t have to be told – we simply know – that what the photos depict is inhumane.

But then we start talking. Conversations about the photos have left some in the media, and probably in the coffeehouses, wondering: Why did the abuse take on such a homoerotic context? Does all of this have anything to do with being gay?

Some activists and commentators on both sides of the political fence say yes, and some say no. Most of them are missing the point.

New York Times columnist Charles Krauthammer, for instance, was probably the first to put forward the cultural insight that the homoerotic nature of the abuse was a premeditated attempt to break down Iraqis in a culturally-specific way, since Arab culture is so openly strict toward homosexuals. Actually, homosexuality is treated as a sin in the Muslim faith “no different than the concept of sex between two people who are not married,” says Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Virginia-based organization Muslim American Society, who was quoted in the Washington Blade this week – it’s the shame of nakedness and the humiliating nature of sexual violence, rather than any culturally-specific taboos, that constitutes the abuse for these men. Surely such forced sexual violation would be equally horrifying for any person, whether from Iraq or from Missouri, to endure.

Donna Hughes, a women’s studies professor writing this week in the National Review, looks at the images and blames pornography. As someone who has documented extreme sexual abuses and their trafficking on the Internet, Hughes suggests that people of the military generation have become desensitized to extreme-violent pornography and, given the right circumstances, young men and women will take any opportunity to become their own pornographers. While Hughes – who describes the Abu Ghraib photographs as “familiar” and describes similar photos featuring sexual humiliations of young women – has probably become desensitized to these images herself, her argument is not as far-fetched as it sounds. She’s made a valuable connection between sex – the very essence of human pleasure, pain and vulnerability – and violence. But having made that connection, Hughes doesn’t know what to do with it. This is about much, much more than the dangers of even the most extreme porn.

This week we’ve also had some interesting comments from gay activists and writers – the best example perhaps coming from Patrick Moore, the author of Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality. Writing in Newsday this week, Moore pointed to the reluctance of the American media to openly discuss the homoerotic nature of the Abu Ghraib abuses, because of a sort of national squeamishness about sex. Moore, who is gay, is one of the few people to admit: “Witnessing one’s very identity being utilized as an extreme form of torture that has evoked worldwide rage is a degrading experience for those of us living in the supposedly more enlightened Western world.” Bravo for putting it on the table, Patrick.

Unfortunately, Moore also misses a crucial point when he refers to the violence depicted in the photographs as “homophobia as a military tactic.” Moore, like Krauthammer, gives the Islamic angle to explain the abuse, writing “the shame lies in the gay identity rather than the act itself.”

Actually, it’s exactly the other way around. The shame is not in any sort of culturally-inspired gay identity in these photographs: It is, actually, about the act itself – an act that is pure violence, however you spin it.

We think most everyone is missing the point. While it may be true that the military is homophobic, that sodomy is particularly degrading to Muslims in a culturally specific way, that the images reflect sexual violence in pornography – the fact remains that these images have nothing to do with being gay and little to do with American or Islamic society, and everything to do with pure, unadulterated sexual violations of the sort that have always been used in torture and violence – whether on women or men, gay or straight, in a prison or in a dark American parking lot. Violations of this kind cut across cultural taboos, and they cut across sexual orientation, ethnicity and gender lines – breaking something more essential, the human, in us.

Gays and lesbians can and should stand up against this abuse – with the knowledge and confidence that sexual violation and abuse has nothing, really, to do with being gay. We abhore and denounce the inhumane treatment of Iraqi prisoners by members of the American military – not because we are gay, or American, or Muslim. But because we are human.