Ted Haggard, Again
pparently, the New Life Church is giving up on Ted Haggard. You guys may remember Ted Haggard — I made some fun of him back when his little scandal broke. Well, despite the three-week crash course in heterosexuality from the New Life Church, and claims afterwards of being “completely heterosexual”, Ted Haggard has “quit” the New Life Church that he founded. The new pastor there says that “the process of restoring Ted Haggard is incomplete.”
Now, I could go ahead and make some more fun here, but the reason I’m pointing this story out to you is because it occurred to me this morning that this poor bastard, Ted, must be living through some kind of hell. Seriously, can you imagine the misery he must suffer?
We can imagine that Ted was probably raised religious, probably a fundamentalist religion, and, as all us rational folk know, you don’t just wake up one day when you’re 30 and say, “What the hell, I’ll be gay.” So, this poor sumbitch has grown up hating himself all his life, but tried hard to fit in, got married, had a kid, and founded a church where, amongst other things, he preached intolerance of homosexuals. And, in the meantime, unable to take hiding or suppressing his natural sexual orientation, he was sneaking out behind everyone’s back and having sex with a gay male escort.
I can’t begin to imagine what this must do to someone’s mind. It would be like if someone told you (assuming you’re straight), “Sorry, no more straight sex for you.” Stop for a minute and think about that — really think it over. Imagine what kind of hell it must be to be sexually oriented one way, and yet made to perform the other way, because some one decided you had to, without consulting you first.
Imagine someone telling you they could “cure” you of being straight.
Honestly, every day I see otherwise decent and intelligent people poisoned by a fundie religion, but that attitude right there, the “gay is wrong and bad and we can fix it” attitude, is truly cancerous.
(Hat tip: Unscrewing the Inscrutable.)
