This was a long time ago so I'm not fresh on which passages are which. I suspect I misremembered the context. Perhaps it was a discussion of how easy interpreting the will of god is supposed to be ('just read it! It's all there!' they say).

The author may have seen it as bad, but it seemed far more connected to lack of a king than the lack of the LORD - they were trying to do god's will in incredibly stupid and immoral ways through that episode. And in this particular case, there were definitely people in that crowd who tried to justify it anyway, saying that the men were evil anyway, and the women would be so glad to be free of them and hitched to good, god-fearing men, that it wasn't rape.

I wish I were making that up.

Anyway, there are god-sanctioned massacres - the Canaanites in particular get it really rough.