Recovery In Sexaholics Anonymous

 In the SA main text, Sexaholics Anonymous (aka the White Book) the sobriety definition is described as a

“a firm and clear bottom line” (page 2).

“not a relative matter that we define for ourselves” (pages 1 & 191).

The concept of “marriage as you understand marriage” promoted prior to the Cleveland  Statement of Principle was neither firm nor clear. Rather it describes is a very “relative matter we define for ourselves” and one that can be defined and redefined at will. It would seem to refer to some sort of arrangement between any number of people with any combination of genders: in the SA literature there is no explicit definition of marriage as only 2 people, only use of the term “the spouse” indicating that sobriety in SA is within a monogamous marriage.

For the term marriage to be a “firm and clear bottom line” and not “a relative matter that we define for ourselves” it must have had a very specific meaning at the time the literature was written. The context of the times, the origins and history of SA, and our approved literature gives us much guidance as to what that meaning is.

The Cleveland Statement of Principle (aka Cleveland Clarification) merely removed any unintended ambiguity.

In the 1990s, prior to the Cleveland Clarification,  my grand-sponsor for a while, a prominent member who endorsed and very actively promoted the liberal interpretation of the sobriety definition wrote in an email

“…leave it up to each person to decide what that (spouse and marriage) means just as we leave the decision on what God means to each person”

Early drafts of the AA 12 Steps did not contain the words “as you understand God”.  It was only following vigorous debate and the insistence of one section of the fellowship that those words were included when the AA Big Book was published in 1939.(see AA Comes of Age).  All SA literature was submitted for review to the fellowship prior to publishing. In the over 30 year history of SA the words “marriage as you understand marriage” have never even been proposed for inclusion in the literature.  This concept was assumed to be part of SA by with none of the rigorous process that AA went through to formally make a similar idea part of that program.

Interestingly my one-time grand-sponsor, when speaking on SA tapes, quotes Bill W clarifying why “defects of character” was used in Step 6 but “shortcomings” in Step 7: Bill W used the two words  as synonyms: he learnt in school not to use the same word in two adjoining sentences.  Bill W is given the right to clarify the meaning of words in AA literature but Roy K, the SA founder, author of most SA literature, is denied the same right.  Such clarifications or opinions he expresses were negated as “just one member’s opinion”.

Since SA was founded Roy K  continuously and consistently clarified the intent, purpose and underlying principles of the meaning of the terms marriage and spouse in SA literature.   The Cleveland Clarification restated the founding intent of SA and put an end to a sustained period of disunity.

Words change their meaning over time. Principles don’t.

One argument used by those against the Cleveland Clarification is that before 1999 the SA literature did not define the terms “spouse” and “marriage” .  Thus the “original SA program” allowed members to define those terms for themselves: endorsing as sexually sober, sex within a same-sex and even polygamous relationship.

In the 1980s and 90s SA Members were so clear that that “marriage meant marriage of a man and a woman” that

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