This is an ugly story

[pegkerr]

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.

Comments

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

From a political bent, I find that these stories always bounce in an unpleasant direction. Just when you think it's going to be "None of us are righteous before God," there will be folks who spin it into "See? Gay men are adulterers, customers of prostitutes, and drug users -- just the sorts of people who don't deserve the privilidges of our most sacred civil institution." And -- again, just me -- it seems a bit like gay-bashing to pummel a man with his sexual orientation just because your views are different than his. One might conclude that only heterosexuals are allowed to be hypocrites.

On a personal level, I can only assume that Rev. Haggard's life has been a challenging one of concealing parts of himself from his family and congregation, and I hope that the initial discomfort of the Light will eventually become an affirming comfort to him. I believe that, as with all people, he deserves comfort and support from both the gay and Christian communities, although I fear that both will desert him. I have faith that God will not, though.

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

Remember who the customer really is. It's not evangelicals, or the GOP. It's the interests served by the GOP, and Haggard's job is to foster false consciousness in the evangelical community so that they vote Republican. There's a rougher term for that, coined by Stalin.

He had been betraying gays and evangelicals, but now he's messed with what Ned Beaty's character in Network called "the forces of nature."

Who Haggard needs to fear right now are the interests represented by the GOP. A GOP loss on Tuesday, while it won't completely confound them (after all, they have their Useful Idiots in the ranks of the Democrats), will make them "less rich." They will be vengeful, and unencumbered by notions of ethics and forgiveness.

When he realized he was going to be outed, Haggard's best choice should had been to cache a few gigabytes of information on strategy, notes on meetings with the White House, and GOP leadership, etc. and defect.

It's easier to forgive, and give shelter to a defector when you have useful intel on the opposition.

[redbird]

He has spent years working against the best interests of the queer community. He's still saying that he's not one of us, and that it would be wrong if he were. No sympathy here.

I would feel sympathy for, say, a closeted minister,outed by an ex-lover, who had focused his preaching on urging his congregation to follow the example of Jesus, and his political activity on something I am sympathetic to. But this man has gotten rich urging strangers to hate and oppress me. Why should I support him?

Christians can offer all the support they feel appropriate.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Mmm. I hear you. Perhaps a better word might be "pity" rather than "sympathy." You are right, I don't feel sympathetic to him at all.

But I do feel a sort of pity (as a Christian--a proud-to-be-progressive-and-pro-gay-civil-rights-Christian) for a man who apparently believes (if the allegations are true; it hasn't yet been proven that they are) that his faith demands that he hate his own true inner nature so much, and that his faith requires him to persecute others for their sexual orientation.

*sigh* That is not my sort of God. You have no idea how galling it is to have to continually defend my Christianity in the face of evidence of hateful hypocrisy of "Christians" like Haggard.

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't know if I've clarified the position in my own mind. I'm definitely not thinking that the opinions that he has espoused deserve support; just him. The platitude that Christians tend to associate with this phenomenon is "love the sinner, hate the sin," which I think can and should be applied more broadly throughout society even though it sounds like Hallmark Channel crap.

It's just, I don't know, here's a guy who had to live in a deceitful manner towards the people closest to him, who was outed in a very public and relatively humiliating manner, and who will probably lose his job and many of his friends as a result of these public revelations. That's sucky. It's sucky when someone gets caught up in a DADT fiasco in the military and has to be discharged, it's sucky when a schoolteacher has to go through the wringer because of her personal life, and I wonder if it doesn't suck in very much the same way here. I think that there are large portions of the gay community who understand him and the situation in which he finds himself, and I pray that some of them find a heroic level of classiness to help him through his own darkness.

Also, as I said above, I want to live in a world where someone's sexual orientation is not cause for snide humor or a feeling that they're about to face social justice for their gayness. That, with all due respect, is what the Enemy does, and I will therefore strive to create the world that does something better. I'm not an angel or a Pollyanna here: I want to stand in front of James Dobson's fat face and say "Metaphorically stoning a gay man isn't right EVEN if it's your best friend and someone who has spent years harming the gay community himself. Every gay person deserves social dignity and civil rights no matter what his political views are." Again, this is a moral position that I borrow from Jesus, who said that the most sensible way to overcome your enemies is to be better than they are, and I think that he was on to something.

I agree with Peg that "pity" is a good start for how I feel. I feel that the place that he is a pitiful state. But, again I don't know, I think about Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela who dismantled apartheid and then, instead of dancing on Botha and DeKlerk's ashes, developed a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to establish relationships based on a common history and a desire to understand each other. I think that is a wonderful model: using the power of Right to defeat Wrong, but then to use your power to purify the Wrong rather than just leaving it to fester in a dark corner to rise again later. I want to do that more often, not only because it is just and feels good, but because it is building the foundation of the next generation's ethics on love and understanding rather than on one week's tactical "gotcha" win.

Anyway, long and boring and probably not well written, but I didn't mean to imply that he deserved a free pass.