Friday, I watched Alexandra Pelosi’s Trials of Ted Haggard. I just watched him on Oprah. Oh yeah, I saw him last week on Nightline. I wondered why has he been on television so much? I felt sympathetic to his plight, an out of work guy trying to take care of his family. All of that business about whether he’s gay or heterosexual with "issues" is really none of my business – that’s for him to decide. But in the course of all this exposure, they repeatedly showed vignettes of him preaching against the specific things we know he was doing at the time. There was one particular one where he saw a member of his church walking out of a gay club. Haggard jumped out of the car to confronted him, apparently praying him "back". Other sermons were about homosexuality, and that it was wrong.
As this has played out in my mind, it has changed over time. Ted Haggard has never admitted anything until he had no other choice. When the most recent guy went public, he played a phone message of Haggard trying to keep him quiet. On Nightline, Haggard told the truth about that relationship, but he really had little choice. He says he didn’t get help, earlier because he was a spokesperson for the Evangelicals and the pastor of a church with 14,000 members who were counting on him. He makes analogies to addicts who get sober, then relapse. He’s quick to point out that his former colleagues and parishoners abandoned him, and his bitterness about that shows.
Several things bothers me in all of these appearances. First, why is he doing them? If he were doing them to help other men who struggle with his problem, whatever it is, that would make sense. But he seems to be spending most of his time explaining himself, like there’s something he wants. Second, he’s trying to find work, first counseling others and now as a salesman, selling insurance – things that rely on trust. Were I he, I wouldn’t try to market my integrity right now. The more it rolls around in my mind [because he’s made himself visible again], the more I think that he just doesn’t get it. He’s looking for forgiveness and understanding. He wants us to be sympathetic to his plight. He wants to explain himself to us.
Sure he was the spokesperson for all of those Evangelicals, but when he "spoke," he was using the bible to condemn every homosexual person in America. Sure, he was the pastor of a 14,000 strong church, but he was exposing himself to a parishoner who came to him for help, and barraging him with text messages about sexual escapades and drug use. He’s exactly like George W. Bush. He wants us to look at things through his eyes rather than the other way around
How about some genuine introspection? How about, "I was praying some guy I saw coming out of a Gay club back into the Beulahland of his marriage while I was doing the same thing he was in my own."? How about this?
How about opening that bible again to the passages you read when you preached, "We don’t have to worry if homosexuality is a sin. It’s in the bible!" and see if those passages aren’t something you cherry-picked out of context like the rest of your colleagues? Independent of what you do with your life and your marriage, how about the fact that you sure weren’t preaching "love thy neighbor as thyself" or "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" or "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Haggard admits that he let his parishoners down, but he means that he let them down by his sexual escapades. How about considering apologizing to them for letting them down by preaching hatred in the church of a religion of love? He was a spokesman for thousands of Evangelicals. How about being a spokesman to the thousands of Evangelicals who are still demonizing homosexuals and unwed mothers every day? How about looking through their eyes?
You write: “He wants forgiveness for the wrong thing.”
So true. That’s the part where religion still has its hold on his thinking. Saddleback Church may have done him a favor in rejecting him and incurring his anger. It may make it easier for him to take the next step and question the concept of his sexuality as sin.
Mickey,
You are an exceptionally generous human bean…probably heading for canonization. You use the honorific title “Pastor” and express sympathy for this sanctimonious cretin. Personally, I regard the term skeptically every time I ‘hear’ it…just doesn’t tweak my respect button in the same way as Reverend, or Father, Bishop, or Minister. The ‘pastor’, in my admittedly snobbish view, is to organized religion as the chiropractor is to real medicine. A lumpen quack able to appeal to an intellectually lazy collection of the uninformed and superstitious.
Haggard, previously scornful condescender-in-chief representing 300,000 Christianists finds his face full of egg by his own perverted hand. I agree with you that his “sin” is on several levels…that his having sex with boys and male prostitutes is not as big as the great deceptions he foisted on his flock and the tremendous damage he perpetrated on the lives of many who never did him any wrong. If he was genuinely motivated by any religious sentiment or actually embraced anything that Jesus ever taught, we would not be seeing him on Larry King or The View or wherever he may be turning up. He would, by now, have made his way quietly to Kolkata and be atoning by wiping the fevered brows of untouchables.
I too find it repugnant to see Haggard parading around the talk shows acting like a victim. He is one of many evangelical dominionists that have elevated themselves self-righteously above the rest of us, looking down upon us only to feel superior.
It is impossible to know the numbers of homosexuals he drove to suicide in his fire-breathing condemnations! All I can say is that his whole little “club” (which include Sarah Palin) are the wolves in sheep’s clothing doing deeds in the name of God that we were warned about.
I would not trade places when the Judgment comes! It is good to simply be a lowly sinner!