{"id":2899,"date":"2009-02-02T01:56:35","date_gmt":"2009-02-02T06:56:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=2899"},"modified":"2009-02-02T14:38:38","modified_gmt":"2009-02-02T19:38:38","slug":"hes-still-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2009\/02\/02\/hes-still-there\/","title":{"rendered":"he’s still there…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Friday, I watched Alexandra Pelosi’s Trials of Ted Haggard<\/strong>. I just watched him on Oprah<\/strong>. Oh yeah, I saw him last week on Nightline<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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<\/u> thousands of Evangelicals. How about being a spokesman to<\/u> the thousands of Evangelicals who are still demonizing homosexuals and unwed mothers every day? How about looking through their eyes?<\/p>\n

I do feel sympathy for Pastor Ted as a down and out fellow human being. I learned about that in a church. But I’m not settled with the fact that he was an active part of a movement that, in my opinion, elected an immoral man to the White House because that man promised to support the hate mongering of the Religious Right and the perversion of the central message of Christianity. Ted Haggard still thinks his sins were his one night stands with a prostitute. That’s his business. But if he wants to look at sin, how about his part in the Religious Right’s anti-Gay activism? How about his part in the political movement that damaged his country? He still doesn’t get it that he allied himself with what is wrong in the world, and that he’s still there. He wants forgiveness for the wrong thing…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2899\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}