Not the Slightest Complexion

Some questions look like A.A. business and are not, and the resemblance is the whole difficulty. Whether a particular medication belongs in a recovering person's life. What a court ought to do with someone who keeps drinking and driving. Whether a treatment model works. These arrive inside the rooms, in the mouths of members, attached to real suffering — and every one of them belongs to a discipline that is not A.A. The service literature draws the line without apology (A.A. Service Manual): "If we recognize that religion is the province of the clergy and the practice of medicine is for doctors, we can helpfully cooperate with both. Certainly there is little basis for controversy in these areas." And then the sentence that settles the month's argument: "It is a fact that A.A. has not the slightest reform or political complexion." Not that A.A. suppresses one. That it hasn't got one. A member may hold any view he likes about medicine or sentencing or policy, and he will. The group has nowhere to put such a view, because there is no organ in A.A. built to form one.