Well, Haggard has now admitted to “Sexual Immorality“. That certainly didn’t take long.
While I certainly enjoy watching this hypocrite twist, I can’t help but wonder how much of what he’s become can be attributed to long-term religious evangelical indoctrination. It must be torturous to truly believe that being gay is a choice (and a grave sin), but have your brain chemistry compelling you towards, and rewarding you for that behavior.
His self-hatred is clear when he says:
“I am a deceiver and a liar. There’s a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life.â€
I had a whole couple of pages written about my thoughts about this guy that I had this weekend, but it’s all beside the point. I think the main point is this.
Conservative religious values are increasingly out of touch with reality. People practicing them will constantly be confronted with how poorly their value systems prepare them to deal with the real world. This confrontation will lead to unease, and usually a desire to either change the world to reflect their value system, or drop the system instead. Ted Haggard adopted a value system that is clearly at odds to the reality of his biology, and the poor bastard has been fighting it probably since puberty. Rather than drop a failed system, he’d rather ride it’s broken carcass into the ground. Which is where he’s at today.
Of course, it was in ways a good ride, he got to be important to a lot of people, he got to have weekly phone calls with George W. So there’s that.
But what makes Ted reprehensible, along with many other evangelicals, is their misguided push to change the world reflect their beliefs when they can’t even change themselves enough to conform to them. Haggard’s efforts to ban gay marriage seem more an externalization of his own disfunction than a genuine effort to preserve the sanctity of marriage. And just because you’re fucked up and want external constraints on your behavior, doesn’t mean the rest of us want or need them.