This is an ugly story

Evangelical leader quits amid male escort's allegations

Top evangelical leader has admitted "some guilt," a church leader says.

It's hard to know what to say about this, other than the hypocrisy smells awful. I feel sorry for his wife and kids. I feel sorry for his church. I must admit a certain amount of sympathy for both Haggard and his accuser, too. It reminds me of the Foley scandal; it was hard to know what to say about that, too.

The man accusing him says that he felt he had to do it because of Haggard's support for Colorado's proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

I have no idea what, if any, of the allegations are true. I will just say in a general way that it is hard for everyone when a leader is shown to have feet of clay.

I did a lot of thinking about the closet when I wrote The Wild Swans. I think that it twists people terribly. If the accusations are true, I would have no trouble believing them, sadly, as shocking as the hypocrisy is, because I think that is what the closet does to you--you get so used to lying that you lose track of your essential self.

If it is true, then I do think the accuser did the right thing. Nothing works to banish the moral stink of hypocrisy better than bright sunlight, as painful as it is to have ugliness revealed.

Very sordid and sad. No one ends up looking good here--Haggard, his church or his accuser.

Edited to add: This was a comment I made to minnehaha B, and I thought I'd add it here.

I don't know very much about Haggard at all. I think when I mean I feel sympathy for him, I mean not for him exactly, but (if the accusations are accurate) sympathy for how he has twisted himself.

I don't know if you've read The Wild Swans (and I'm not asking you to say whether you have or haven't). But what I'm getting at is the utter devastation that William felt near the end of the book, when he thinks of the speech of excommunication, believing to the core of his soul it should apply to him and he is therefore damned for all eternity--and blows that candle out. I honestly think that is the most sadly bleak moment in the book. That sadness is what I feel sympathetic about--how a man who feels a religious calling and wants to be moral gets it so utterly wrong because of what he feels his religion forces him to believe about homosexuality, and feels himself to be damned accordingly.

A veil is a veil. Or is it?

I got this from broadsheet[Error: unknown template 'video']broadsheet  says: "The Burqa Band," aka the first known girl band in Afghanistan. Begun in 2003, the trio became a cult hit in Europe -- especially in Germany, where the band's single "Burqa Blue" caught the attention of media outlets and climbed to the top of the playlists in dance clubs.

In the context of so much semiotic contortionism over the meaning of the veil, the mystery band offers us a curious glimpse from, well, inside a giant blue burqa. In their video the trio is seen playing in what appears to be a dingy apartment; later, MTV style, they appear doing synchronized dance movements from a mountain overlooking Kabul. At all times they are, of course, completely hidden in their tentlike garments.

Against a raw beat, the vocalist chants a sardonic ditty in choppy schoolgirl English:

"My mother wears a burqa,
my father wears it too.
I have to wear a burqa too,
the burqa it is blue.
When you wear a burqa
you don't know who is who,
if you want to meet your sister,
it can be your uncle too."

Happy subversion! In the song, the veil doesn't so much segregate the genders as render them indistinguishable. At the end of the song, the words even wreck the logic of courtship:

"You give me all your love,
you give me all your kisses and then
you touch my burqa and do not know who is it."

But like so many instances of people reclaiming the weapons of their own oppression -- nouveau feminists embracing the 6-inch pump, for one -- the story of the Burqa Band is a bittersweet one. The burqa not only was their source of inspiration but was a vital necessity to protect the group's members from religious fanatics. For decades under the Taliban, playing and listening to pop music were strictly prohibited, so wearing burqas to play music in Afghanistan isn't just a bit of playful sabotage. And despite all the media attention from the West, the Burqa Band remains shrouded in secrecy and no longer actively plays music. (According to some reports, each woman's identity in Afghanistan is known by only about 10 people.) In one interview the band's drummer, known to the media as "Nargiz," says that though she'd love to be playing, she believes it will take another decade before it's safe to be a female musician in Kabul. 

--Carol Lloyd

"Rev." Ted Haggard again

"I bought the meth . . . but I never used it."

Okay, that's it, boyo. You just blew the last scrap of whatever meager pity I might have had for you.

I'd hazard a wild guess that you probably deserve all the mud and muck that's going to avalanche down on you the next several weeks. Just sayin'.