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and Sexual Addiction |
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By Bob Minor Minor Details
What broke this pattern to some extent was what often brings meaningful, radical change in a society: the persistent objections of common folk. They were tired of being a part of the cover-up because the price they were paying for protecting the institution was their own emotional healing. To quote Fannie Lou Hammer, they were "sick and tired of being sick and tired." The organization next tried to settle to protect its reputation. It didn't want questions raised about whether something systemic was going on, whether its structure, values, and processes were really at fault. Then it argued that the pedophiles were isolated cases, just "bad apples" that haven't spoiled the barrel itself. In the same way, the Los Angeles police department has argued this through one scandal after another. Finally, under continual pressure from those who were trying to end what was hurting them, the Church moved into a "damage control" mode, agreeing to turn over "necessary" information to law enforcement authorities. Who knows how many cases it won't turn over because people haven't threatened to sue? That's the story, but what's missing? First, what about the complaints of priestly abuse from women? Society takes the story with more seriousness when men are the victims of sexual activity. Women are treated as less important in such matters, as if victimhood is to be expected. Real men aren't supposed to be victims of sexual activity. They should be in charge.
The existence of sexual abuse by the clergy beyond the Catholic Church is another societal secret. It's widely swept under the rug by denominations and local churches. And these cover-ups are successful unless media or police get involved who are willing to break the history of colluding with Christianity. But what's missing most from this story is what this says about dominant attitudes toward sexuality in our culture. Sex is useful economically and morally. Sex sells our products and life-styles. And sex is a favorite device to shame and demean the sexually active. Sex is also useful for putting down minorities (racial, sexual, and otherwise) who are pictured as more sexually active than the "normal," "civilized," and "mature" among us. As an expert on addictions, Anne Wilson Schaef has much to say about all this as a part of our societal illness. In her Escape from Intimacy: Untangling the 'Love' Addictions: Sex, Romance, Relationships (1989), she writes that sexual addiction is "of epidemic proportions in this society and is integrated into the addictiveness of society as a whole." It is, in fact, one of the addictions most woven into our society as "normal." This is obvious when we listen to Schaef's definition of sexual addiction - "an obsession and preoccupation with sex, in which everything is defined sexually or by its sexuality and all perceptions and relationships are sexualized." There is little question that this defines mainstream U.S. society, including the training of LGBT people. Now, we are used to thinking of sexual addiction as an out-of-control search for sexual action. In that sense, pedophilia and other sexual abuse are often ways of acting out of a sexual addiction. But what some may not want to face, she explains, is celibacy as sexual addiction. When celibacy is a struggle, it's a sign that one is acting out of an addiction, a preoccupation and obsession with sex. And when any institution focuses on sexuality, that's a sign that the institution is promoting, even built upon, sexual addiction.
Though we are taught to respond that celibacy is a struggle for
everyone, it's actually not when it arises out of a healthy inner
process that leads a person to a place where they are naturally
celibate. But denial is also the mark of an addict, and the struggle
with sexuality, which our dominant institutions might say is normal, is
denial and not natural. It's the mark of an obsession that may take the
form of repulsion.
Patrick Carnes (Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction, 1985) identifies a repressive sexual addiction to include persons who are obsessed with repressing sexuality, their own and other's. This includes specifically sexual righteousness, obsessive sexual purity, nonintegrated celibacy, and religious sexual obsession. Addictions function to keep us from dealing with the issues that could change our lives. And the obsession with and repression of sex and sexuality by the institutions of our culture functions to keep society and its institutions unchanged, no matter how unhealthy they are. As people who grew up in this society, we LGBT people have also been conditioned to buy into this dominant addictive process. However, it's now our choice whether we buy into the values and justifications of the process that keeps the sexual addictions going or we choose to live alternative, healthy lifestyles which are not those a sexually sick society has set before us. 
Robert N. Minor, Ph.D. is the author of Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard
to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human (HumanityWorks!,
2001) and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. He
was a member of the Values Panel for the Kansas City Star's nationally
award winning "Raising Kansas City Project" which was concerned with the
values we teach the next generation. He may be reached at Minor@libertypress.net.
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Cardinal Law of Boston: Can he and other church leaders get their priests to keep their peckers in their pants? 
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