By some accounts, DSK has been exonerated. Exonerated?
Let's dismiss any criminality in that hotel room that day. Let's say that anything done in that room was consensual between two adults. Let's allow for the greater sexual permissiveness the French seem to tolerate.
Facts that everyone seems to agree on:
- DSK is married.
- DSK had some kind of sexual encounter with someone not his wife in the hotel room.
- DSK, we can presume, had never even seen this woman before, unless she had cleaned his room prior to that day. It appears he is willing to copulate with any convenient woman.
Exonerated? By my account, even in the most benign accounting of the affair, DSK proves himself to be one who earns the disgust of God's people. The story reminds me of another powerful man who decided to have sex with someone far less than powerful than he--King David of Israel and Bathsheba. That story in the Bible results in horrible consequences for many people, including the King himself.
This is not a case of boys will be boys. Not even a case of French men will be French men. This is disgusting. This is light years away from God's intention of love between a man and a woman.
News reports indicate that DSK's wife has reluctantly come to an acceptance of her husband's philandering ways. The courts, it seem, will not be able to prosecute him for any legal wrong-doing. But to think that he has somehow escaped culpability here is nonsense. Jesus says that a man and a woman become one in marriage--not three or four or fourteen.
"I take you, (name) to be my wife/husband from this day forward, to join with you and share all that is to come, and I promise to be faithful to you until death parts us." (ELW, p. 288)
