Many monuments could be built to my stupidity, but no one ever bothers to actually build one. I remain an unrecognized genius of stupidity.
I suspect the reason why this statement rubs people the wrong way is that both are horrifyingly terrible things, and the reality is that we're really comparing things so far at the other end of the spectrum from happy happy joy joy that they might as well be the same and being that close at the end it's disingenuous to compare them, especially since there are examples of rapes that are clearly worse than some murders, and examples of murders that are clearly worse than some rapes.
You can't generalize, as I did, that "murder is worse than rape" because that's not going to be true for every instance of murder and rape.
However, the law does take into account, to some degree, the severity of the act in either case and thus there are some rapists that get worse punishment than some murderers.
But strictly speaking, comparing one count of rape against one count of murder with no extenuating factors, no pre-meditiation in either case, etc, the punishment for murder is generally more severe, and I don't think it's because lawmakers can't know, or don't know, or haven't taken into account the trauma that rape can inflict.
So, very generally speaking, I don't think our society holds rape to quite the severity as murder. I don't think the law is far from what the majority actually believe the punishment should be. I think that if people want to punish rapists more harshly than murders, generally, then society will have to change to believe that rape is a worse crime than murder. I don't think it's the other way around.