July 28, Ordinary 17B (2 Samuel 11:1–15)
It’s almost as if power and prestige somehow facilitate abusive patterns and protect perpetrators!
As a child, I loved The Cosby Show, and Bill Cosby’s pudding commercials, and his comedy bit about eating cake for breakfast. (Just the other day I ate a cupcake for breakfast based on his reasoning that cake includes milk and eggs.) When sexual assault accusations against him began to emerge publicly, I didn’t know how to reconcile the lovable TV dad with the man who drugged and raped women.
As an adult, I had a passing appreciation for the comedy of Louis C. K., partly because of how he addressed issues of sexism. But it turns out that even as his stand-up routines acknowledged the ways women are often victimized, he was, himself, victimizing women.
And of course it is not just comedians who fall from grace. It has become public knowledge that Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder and L’Arche founder Jean Vanier both committed spiritual and sexual abuse against multiple victims.
