Sex and Power: Politicians and Spiritual Leaders, an Unequal Treatment

Sex and Power

Politicians and Spiritual Leaders, Behind the Scenes: An Unequal Treatment

By André Tarassi of the CICNS (2006)

The least one can say, when researching allegations of sexual abuse against politicians (1), is that they are much harder to find in the public square than those against spiritual leaders. So much so that there is no trace on the Internet of past affairs in France (even if we have partially kept them in memory), and one must turn to information from the United States or Quebec to find debates not limited to the simplistic but popular equation sexual abuse = spiritual leaders.

This discovery, which at first seemed to me unexpected, is, on reflection… unsurprising.

We in France tend to forgive more easily the escapades of our politicians, and the media, always well informed about what we adore and what we hold in holy horror, will consign to oblivion the “information” about politicians and blow up out of proportion that which concerns the gurus. Thus, still in France, a president reputed to have been a sexual predator will make a good number of our fellow citizens smile, even if that implies, as is the case behind the scenes of the State, using the charms of power to induce certain women to secret favours. We have seen that, in the same situation, a spiritual leader provokes shrieks of outrage and feeds parliamentary commissions of enquiry without end.

It is the hypocrisy of our time that wills it so, no doubt.

In “Politics and lies, why do politicians lie?”, Mark Perkel, an American journalist, writes: ”(…) The reason politicians lie is that the public does not want to hear the truth. People want to hear what they want to hear. When, of two candidates for the presidential election, one tells the truth and the other gives what the public wants to hear, it is the second who is elected (…) A Democrat can admit to having smoked hashish and say he regrets it, but a Republican cannot even say he did it, some will go so far as to say they never touched a cigarette. Both are lying (…) Sex is a sensitive subject for voters. The Bible says that sex is acceptable within a virgin, monogamous marriage and that leaders must be examples. Yet we are the descendants of three billion years of sexual activity, and all creatures, down to the plants, want to give themselves pleasure. Male politicians who have the strength, the health and the self-confidence to rise above the mass are sexually very active people. Throughout history, kings and other great men have had numerous mistresses (…) men of power do not know how to resist the temptations of women who solicit them. Candidates are therefore forced into lying (…) What should we expect of our politicians? Should they rise to moral perfection? Or should we simply ask them to do the work they have to do? In the old days, kings were considered Gods, people had no television, no books, no Internet. Kings had absolute power and the right of life or death over everyone, virgins were thrown into volcanoes. There were people who knew how to party! Things have changed. We are in a democracy. We elect people for a specific job. Our leaders are less leaders than public servants. They work for us, they are our employees (…) If we want our politicians to tell the truth, voters must stop punishing honesty (…) consequently, when a politician tells you that world population is an important subject, do not condemn him, and listen to him.”

In France, an affair like that of the American president Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, in 1998, would not take on the proportions it took over there. In 2001, a Republican by the name of Chris Say declared on CNN that if infidelity were a political test, many members of Congress would have had to resign. The polls of recent years in the United States show, moreover, that the greater part of Americans now agree with Mr Say’s implication. Why then so much fuss in spiritual circles over affairs (I am not speaking of paedophilia or rape) that pale beside the escapades of men of power? It would indeed seem that the spiritual quest is a domain that has remained taboo, where scapegoats can be found. We have, in fact, a paradoxical relationship with sexuality: we have been demanding for forty years that it be “liberated”, but we expect from spiritual leaders an attitude that is very retrograde by comparison. Doubtless, despite our needs for liberation, we are all steeped in that Judeo-Christian education which gave pride of place to guilt on this question, and which leads automatically to these denunciations from another age when sexuality is at issue.

(1) Read, on this subject, the book that is making itself talked about at the end of summer 2006: Sexus Politicus (Albin Michel)

Read also: Calumny: The Dominique Baudis affair

Read the first part of our Sexual Abuse dossier

Read What political journalists never tell, Albin Michel, Paris 2003.

André Tarassi was born in 1961, he is the founder of the CICNS. An independent researcher, he has studied the New Spiritualities for 25 years. He studied journalism and television in the United States. He has published, under another name, several works on the spiritual path.