Was this really so hard an episode to respond to competently?
As discussed in this post, the Dalai Lama got himself videoed while pressuring a young boy to kiss him (on the lips) and asking the boy to <cough> suck the holy man’s tongue. Too bad Peter Graves is dead: he could play the Dalai Lama in a movie…
“Joey…would you like to suck my tongue?” was apparently cut. But I digress.
On “CNN Tonight” panel this week, and host Alisyn Camerota asked Michaelson to comment on the disturbing video. Ethics Aalrms frozen solid, the rabbi answered,
“The Dalai Lama is a very playful human being. And we may see this in a weird, kind of gross, sexualized way, but this is about as sexual as a bowl of plain rice. There is nothing sexual … or erotic happening in this encounter. Tibetan culture just has different boundaries…[the tongue] is what we kiss with, it’s sexualized … it’s not seen that way in Tibetan culture. This is a part of the body. It’s something playful….The apology was in order. This was clearly something that was at best, you know, insensitive to how this would be seen by a large swath of the world population. [But]“the Dalai Lama is one of my spiritual heroes. I have met him. Being in his presence is really one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in my life. And the aura of loving kindness that he has is evident, even here where he’s being playful in a way that in Western culture would certainly be inappropriate.”
Since the rabbi wasn’t defending Joe Biden, Camerota felt free to actually practice journalism and challenge this spin, saying, “the boy doesn’t want to” kiss the Dalai Lama or suck his tongue,” and adding that the Dalai Lama is “taking the boy’s head … just sort of reading the body language here. I’ll take your word for it that it seemed differently there culturally, but the boy doesn’t seem to be wanting to participate in this.”
Ethics Alarms 