Garth Brooks Serial Cheater, Accused of Sexual Assault

I was just thinking the other day (uh oh) regarding reports of Slipknot has-been Corey Taylor asking fans to give Dave Grohl some “grace” for cheating and spawning outside his marriage.

It’s unclear whether the curious choice of the word “grace” was Taylor’s or just how the People Mag hack summed up Taylor’s enabling request for clemency but I had a sudden revelation that a word with both religious and secular overtones may have been carefully chosen. On the one hand the term “grace” could be viewed as code to Christian readers that, despite the fact that adultery is condemned in scripture, so is lack of forgiveness, i.e., grace, which is the entire foundation of Christianity. But I thought use of the word also begs the question of whether mainstream media’s current cheater apologism tear could be characterized as a kind of religious war.

Maybe it would be more accurate to say it’s a war to prevent secular and nonsecular interests from aligning over a particular humanist issue. This is a bit hard to explain so bear with me and I’ll try not to be too boring and wonky about it (but you know how I get).

To boil it down, corrupt powers-that-be always get especially itchy when religious and secular morals begin to align in ways that challenge power and profits. In that sense, deep divisions between religious and secular ethics can serve power in a divide and conquer way while intersecting interests are viewed a bit suspiciously in closed boardrooms and the halls of power because these can sometimes foment mass popular resistance against power due to the fact that the bridge issues always tend to– ugh– relate to social, environmental and economic justice.

So what would happen if secular progressives– Perel’s main target audience– began objecting to adultery– which has traditionally been largely in the conceptual domain of religion– as strongly as people of faith traditionally have and all started swapping spit regarding their reasons for objecting to it? You’d end up with hubs like CN in which people from all walks and a vast range of perspectives and backgrounds start finding accord, mutual respect and making room for each other around a common cause. Oh noes. People from even very strict secular backgrounds might start adding forensic, sociological, medical, psychological and economic theories to their arsenals regarding why cheating sucks and is destructive and carrying those ideas back to their spiritual communities like viral social justice vectors. Nonsecular types might start developing sensitivity and respect for the concept of spiritual injury and develop ways to communicate with people of faith.

The word “grace” wasn’t the only thing that set me off on this tangent. The NY Times was so alarmed by a 2014 Gallup poll report of increasing public objections to adultery that it published a frantic editorial that attempted– against glaring evidence to the contrary– to frame this growing prohibition as a scary measure of the influence of the radical religious right (read: repressive puritans and “domestic terrorists”). But, by the fact that the same people polled that year and in previous years were showing an increased acceptance of things like gay marriage and single parenting, the Times blatantly false interpretation of the findings might smack of an attempt to re-sow traditional secular/nonsecular division on the issue. The message to the Times’ progressive readers was “don’t go all Timothy McVeigh by objecting to adultery.”

In truth, the remarkable rise in prohibitions against adultery in the last twenty years likely relates more to the Oprah-ization of the public since the 80s and the spread of self-help conceptions of domestic emotional abuse and the generational costs of family dysfunction. Aside from being a sin in scripture, adultery and other forms of emotional abuse are mean, cause depression and discord and destabilize children and families. This has clearly also spread within religious communities evidenced by a shift– however slow and limited– to clergy and spiritual advisors helping victims of not only severe domestic violence but emotional abuse leave marriages despite traditional prohibitions against divorce. Through this increasing view that people have a right to break vows due to emotional abuse, various religious communities are starting to veer in a direction of secular social justice which has long irked the powers-that-be– not because it waters down and weakens religious faith and practices but because it shows too much “united we stand” convergence with secular views.

To the arguably patriarchal powers-that-be, any issue that causes too much Kumbaya between secular and nonsecular has powder keg potential to start spreading views across all sorts of divisions. And then where does it stop? Just in terms of CL’s and CN’s reach and bent, the “cheating as abuse” position is already beginning to overlap with the fraught battle over the criminalization of coercive control and the movement to align the legal definition of sexual consent with the definition of financial consent.

Obviously the latter two legislative pushes discomfit every type of perv in power around the world. Think of the influence and untold corporate campaign sponsorship investments lost by political sex scandal takedowns. Then, as far as purely economic stakes, think of the gadzillions in tort costs and lost profits for every public figure or celebrity taken down by scandal, especially since #MeToo. Garth Brooks alone currently generates about $60 to $90m in profits per year. Netflix lost $39 million from being forced to sack Kevin Spacey. Rape allegations are one thing but how much has Jonah Hill’s career suffered since allegations of domestic emotional abuse and control emerged against him? Ryan Adams sold $3m in albums prior to domestic emotional abuse allegations against him. Where is he now?

Add to this the staggering profits from industries like streaming porn and online dating that arguably rely on a sort of “cheating ethos” for market growth while porn in particular relies on the public’s squashy concepts of sexual consent and coercion in order to keep trafficking and exploiting porn performers. Then think of the history of how the perks of patriarchy, even if these are at odds with economic interests, have driven societies and cultures since time immemorial or the evolutionary theory that has it that humans, like our ape ancestors, are largely driven by sexual dominance and coercive access to the pussy buffet.

Anyway, back to the perceived danger of cross pollination between secular and nonsecular interests, think of the civil rights movement which fomented in the church and was ostensibly led by church figures like Martin Luther King but soon amassed wide secular involvement. More disconcerting to power was how the Civil Rights movement began to cross-pollinate with the movement to end the Vietnam War and to question modern corporate capitalism, not to mention that MLK’s last activist gesture was a trip to Memphis to support environmental justice on behalf of sanitation workers.

We all know how that ended. But not many north Americans understand that it was a particular theological approach employed by King and other civil rights leaders which was drawing such passionate support across racial, secular and religious and class bounds and which also made the movement naturally compatible with other humanist and environmental causes– something called Liberation Theology. It was catching like wildfire around the world at the time and transforming church establishments in some countries from power-enabling hubs of hypocrisy into gathering points of popular humanitarian, economic and environmental uprising and was supported by Vatican II in the 60s.

I’m not that versed in theology but to grossly oversimplify, Liberation Theology or “LT” mainly draws guidance from the words of Jesus Christ and shifts away from other aspects of scripture in order to address the problems of poverty and social injustice. The current pope, though criticized by some as an ethically “gray” and overly political figure who doesn’t go quite far enough to support social justice, generally aligns himself with LT enough to be despised by authoritarians and considered an enemy of corporate interests around the world. LT also hasn’t confined itself to Catholicism but spread to other religions. For instance, a Muslim rendition of LT was reportedly at the core of the Arab Spring uprising.

Even if most north Americans aren’t aware of the role that Liberation Theology has played in major historical events in the last century, those in power can’t afford to ignore it. It was considered so dangerous to corporate power that Nixon complained about the ‘deterioration of the attitude of the Catholic Church.’ ‘[T]hey’re about one-third Marxist, and the other third are in the center, and the other third are Catholics… in the old days…you could count on the Catholic Church for many things to play an effective role.’

Under Nixon, the CIA began to form specific plans to combat Liberation Theology in Latin America (i.e., the Banzer Plan) and take out church figures who spread the cross-pollinating doctrine. The US-sponsored School of the Americas which trains Latin American military puppets in the violent art of squashing popular resistance in order to keep Latin America as an ATM for cheap labor and resources brags to all new recruits about how alumni helped the US win the “war against Liberation Theology” in Central and South America in the 70s and 80s.

That’s something else that most north Americans aren’t aware of– that the string of violent US backed military coups and murderous dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, etc., in the 70s dubbed “Operation Condor” and support of government death squads in El Salvador and fascist Contras in Nicaragua in the 80s were, in fact, part of a religious war against “rogue elements” in the church in those countries. To this day, Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was sort of the MLK or El Salvador and was arguably assassinated by the same conspirators, remains a hero for nonsecular progressives to this day.

I’m not suggesting there’s going to be a plot against beloved Divorce Minister but trying to point out that, as a social issue, correlating cheating with abuse is mighty fraught because it messes with one of the central perks of abusive power and there will be blowback on a surprising level, especially as the issue begins to cross divisions– a convergence that doesn’t go unnoticed and has long been a political tripwire.

I was raised agnostic but I don’t simply dismiss religion as the “opiate of the masses” and a “weapon of patriarchy” because it can also be a force of humanitarian political shifts. It’s the reason Jesus was not just taken out as a threat to established religion but was also “politically” assassinated. Anyway, as the media increasingly squares off against the “cheating is abuse” position, I smell certain divisive tactics brewing in boardrooms that may relate to this irritating commingling of secular and nonsecular views of infidelity. I anticipate efforts to break up the “marriage.”