More and more Haggard stuff

From the CO Springs Gazette:

Concerning Ted and his family, we have done extensive fact-finding into his lifelong battle with a “dark side” which he said in his confession letter has been a struggle for years. We have verified the reality of that struggle through numerous individuals who reported to us firsthand knowledge of everything from sordid conversation to overt suggestions to improper activities to improper relationships. These findings established a pattern of behavior that culminated in the final relationship in which Ted was, as a matter of grace, caught. We learned most of those circumstances through confidential pastoral communications that, because of their pastoral character, cannot be disclosed.

Oh, yeah, that's right: This church investigation found "numerous individuals" who had "firsthand knowledge" of "improper activities" and "improper relationships".

Translation: Ted's been a busy boy!

Too bad they aren't giving out details. If anyone out there reading this is one of those numerous individuals, please, please let me in on the secret. I'll be your best friend!

Either way, though, if not finding others that he was involved with makes him completely heterosexual, then I guess that he's not. Not that there was anyone on the planet who believed he was in the first place.

Thanks to Kevin of Holy Moly for pointing me to this article.

(Crossposted onto bilerico.)

Haggard Update

When I saw this last night about Ted Haggard wanting to become an psychologist online, I laughed and decided to save it for TWIP this weekend. But then I saw this on the Denver Post, and couldn't wait. According to one of his "overseers":

"He is completely heterosexual," Ralph said. "That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing."

Uh, yeah, whatever. If anyone needs an explanation as to why a guy who hires a male prostitute for three years is not completely heterosexual, check out this post at Good As You.

There's just so much to this, I don't know what to say. Here we have a 50-year-old gay man, who by any account from anyone credible, is stuck in an unsatisfying relationship with his wife and, until recently, completely cut off from the outside world (why does this sound like a cult?), a (presumably) straight woman who's married to this guy, who has remained silent on this issue and will remain married to him, at least in the near future, and four kids who have to move around a whole lot now because no one will acknowledge the truth about this whole thing. There are other characters, like the team of fundamentalists who are trying to manage this "crisis" and push their politics at the same time so they can keep pushing the "gays can change" narrative, his congregation who lost their pastor but support him and hope he ex-gays himself for his own sake, the GLBT community and allies, who, while we make fun of this whole drama, would really like for him to come out and live his life honestly for both his sake and because of the personal political stakes, and the heterosexual population at large who's just shaking their heads wondering what's happened or just waiting for the next juicy piece of gossip but otherwise don't care about how this works itself out.

Isn't this a crazy drama?

When exposed, Mark Foley came out through his attorney while in rehab, Jim West denied it until he died, and James McGreevey embraced the GLBT community. Haggard, an anti-gay authority figure who was also outed through scandal, has "ex-gayed" and decided to stay in the closet and not speak about his sexuality publicly, only through spokesmen. While those of us not in positions of authority have developed a set of coming out rituals, these people, so far removed from out-n-proud GLBT people, through their own choice, cannot respectably come out.

As much as his "overseers" want to claim him for the anti-gay community, he is one of the most publicly visible queer people in the country. For better or worse, he is, in a small, nuanced way, representing us.

Rehab is the new black; it goes with everything.

From 365gay.com:

Haggard and his wife, Gayle, completed a counseling program in Arizona and are back in Colorado Springs, Brendle said.

So he's out of part of his rehab. Pam Spaulding thinks that it's not the end of the ex-gaying of Pastor Ted.

But it reminded me that he was in rehab for being too gay. And it reminded me of this story I read earlier today on The Advocate:

The cast of Grey's Anatomy accepted a Screen Actors Guild award for drama series ensemble on Sunday night in Los Angeles—minus cast member Isaiah Washington. The actor is in therapy for his use of an antigay slur.

He's in rehab for being too anti-gay.

This all made me wonder about how incredibly divisive gay issues are. Each side on the are-gay-people-complete-and-equal-human-beings debate (depressing that we even have to debate it) thinks that anyone who disagrees with them must be crazy.

Maybe that's telling us something. Maybe it's telling us that this debate isn't really a debate - there isn't any statistic or logic that can change people's minds - rather it's, at best, a battle over framing and symbolism or, at worst, a complete impasse.

I'm an optimist, so I think that equality can be achieved with work - deep, dirty, political work to change the dominant narrative about queer people. But the next time someone says that we just need to present our arguments, remember that the far right thinks that we're actually insane.

Hypocrisy isn't such a good thing

The Advocate has an interview with Alexandra Pelosi about her HBO documentary Friends of God. She touches on something that I've been thinking about:

We talked about gay marriage. He said, “I think the gays should be lobbying for civil unions, because that’s more doable.” He wasn’t a hater. And I know everyone likes to talk about how he was a hypocrite, but I think Stephen Colbert said it best [originally about Mark Foley]: Ted Haggard is not a hypocrite—he didn’t try and gay-marry anyone. He knows homosexuality; he preached from the pulpit that homosexuality is a sin. That’s what he believes because that’s in the Bible. Now, he did it…that doesn’t mean he didn’t know it was a sin.

OK, this touches on why I think that the hypocrisy narrative related to outings like those of Mark Foley and Ted Haggard is both inaccurate and ineffective in trying to get queer equality.

Alexandra Pelosi basically says why it's inaccurate: these Christians think that homosexuality is sin. They believe that every single human being sins. When they commits this specific sin, it's not hypocrisy; it fits quite neatly in the way they see the world. In fact, it bolsters their view that homosexuality is a fleeting desire; part of the fall from the grace of God that can be solved through salvation and prayer (ignoring his repeated attempts at praying away the gay, which they do). Ted Haggard as a closet case is much closer to their ideal than Ted Haggard as a out and proud gay man would be.

Second, it's not an entirely effective way to interpret the phenomenon of gay gay-bashers. Let's think about Lisa, the hypothetical person. Lisa is big on getting people to donate money to breast cancer research. She tells everyone she meets about how important it is to get money for this sort of research, tries to get sponsors for her to Race for a Cure, and vocally laments the lack of such funding from the government. But she herself, even though she lives quite comfortably, doesn't donate any money at all to breast cancer research. She's just plain selfish.

Does this make Lisa a hypocrite? Absolutely. It would be much better if she donated money as well. But she would also cease to be a hypocrite if she just stopped being such an advocate for breast cancer research as well. Supposing there were no way to pry this money from her hands, would it be better if she just shut up about the whole thing? What if she were effective at getting people to donate?

This is the way heterosexists view the Ted Haggards and Mark Foleys. You can even read about it in their press releases, how the views that a certain politician holds and his or her legislative actions are far more important than his or her personal actions. They have a built-in answer to the hypocrisy charge that is quite persuasive, if one buys into heterosexual supremacy.

A better way to frame these instances is to label it for what it really is: proof of a direct refutation of their argument that being queer is a choice. Here are people who would absolutely choose not to be queer if they could. No doubt about that. Haggard tried to pray away the gay, as he said in his public statement just after Mike Jones outed him. But he couldn't. If he couldn't, how are we to believe that anyone else can?

By speaking the language of fact, truth versus untruth, instead of the language of morality, I think that we stand a better chance of interpreting this situation in a way that conservative Christians can understand. They already think that we're morally bankrupt, and they have a more than logical answer to that interpretation, so it's not going to change any minds.

While I've said before that heterosexism is more than just a lack of information, it's also something that can be changed. It's a worldview that people invest a lot of energy into, but if we seize on opportunities like to show the obvious (to us) contradictions is heterosexist thought, we can change a few minds.

Pastor Ted talks about his sex life

Pelosi's daughter has a documentary that will show on HBO, and Pastor Ted's in it. Here's a bit from ABC News:

In the film, he proclaims that evangelicals have the best sex lives in the world. "You know all the surveys say that evangelicals have the best sex life of any other group," he says. In the documentary, Haggard asks an evangelical next to him how often he has sex with his wife. The man replies, "Every day." Haggard then explains that evangelicals have a lot of love and says to Pelosi, "You don't think these babies come out of nowhere?"

Ew, ew, ew, ew.

And that's the mature response.

At least he's showing he paid attention in Conservative Statistics 101: "You know all the surveys say...." Yes, a vague reference to all the surveys. Touche, Mr. Haggard, touche. Although someone told me that you needed crystal meth to have sex with your wife.

UPDATE: Speaking of Evangelicals and statistics, Christianity Today has a great article up about just that. And no one can say the author's anti-Christian: He's a youth minister named Christian who writes for Christianity Today.

Justin Lookadoo, here's looking at you!

After seeing that the New Life Church's leadership proves that Protestant clergy is just as gay as Catholic, we find out that gayness among Evangelicals gets even funnier. Ex-Gay Watch warns us about some nefarious plan for Exodus International to recruit Christian kids for gay bashing, and upon following the link, we find a montage of face pics more gay than any we've seen on DList. Check it out here.

We're interested in this Justin Lookadoo, motivational speaker and author of like 100 books about teen dating. Do visit his page. We learned a lot of things there, like:

• He's from El Paso, and he considers living in Mexico his "coolest experience"
  
  
• He has "closet friends", either friends who are in the closet or from when he was in the closet
  
  
• Two of his favorite singers are totally gay
  
  
• He has make-up tips for girls, and calls Cristina Aguilera "trasky"... Cat fight!
  
  
• He faces the day ass-first
  
  
• He has a "he male strut which works on the women", he wants to be one of the Village People, he's riding an imaginary bull and slapping it's ass.... God, we can't point out the gay subtext and make it funny when it's a gay super-text. Come out already!
  

Pastor Ted's rehab will be unbearably annoying

From the Agape Press

:In the new church or ministry environment, Wickman explains, a pastor is provided with service opportunities, accountability and other "things that he's used to," in a setting "where he can agonize in front of people that are sympathetic and understanding."

Riiiiiight.... Because he's so used to accountability.

We're still hoping for something that we're more familiar with when it comes to rehab, like freakouts, eating without sharp objects, and weekend romance. As is par for course with Agape Press, the article reluctantly provides a little bit of truth:

"And to be called of God and to have no place to go is agonizing," Wickman adds. And this is true "particularly for his wife," he notes, "whom we have found always takes longer to recover than the husband."

What? Mrs. Pastor Ted isn't going to have fun ex-gaying her husband and then spending the rest of her life with a closeted nelly with an affinity for the crystal meth?

Why pay $25,000 and $200/hour when Gay.com is free?

Rev. Louis Sheldon is telling The Jewish Week that he knew about Pastor Ted's love of manly massages long before Mike Post put the "tell" in "kiss and tell":

Sheldon disclosed that he and “a lot” of others knew about Haggard’s homosexuality “for awhile ... but we weren’t sure just how to deal with it. Months before a male prostitute publicly revealed Haggard’s secret relationship with him, and the reverend’s drug use as well, “Ted and I had a discussion,” explained Sheldon, who said Haggard gave him a telltale signal then: “He said homosexuality is genetic. I said, no it isn’t. But I just knew he was covering up. They need to say that.”

Remember, this Louis Sheldon who kept Pastor Ted's Love-of-Men on the d-l while publicly opposing married men's fundamental human right to have sex with hot male prostitutes and then do meth is the same Louis Sheldon who worked against banning internet gambling for at least $25,000 while publicly opposing gambling. We want to know how much that cost Pastor Ted, and if his could be the most expensive trips to the local call-boy ever in Colorado.

And since we were slacking all day eating French cheese, drinking diet soda, and generally being liberals, here are other people who got this much sooner than we did and had more intelligent things to say about it: Andrew Sullivan, John Aravosis, Pam Spaulding, and, let's say, a goat.

BREAKING: SOMETHING NOT LIKE A PENIS AT ALL MAKES A GAY MAN THINK OF A PENIS

Or something like that.

I once went out with a guy who called his penis “Jackson.” Out of nowhere, he’d say, “Jackson likes this,” or “Jackson likes that,” as if the appendage were actually a separate entity. It didn’t take long for Jackson, his handler, and me to part company, and not just because I wasn’t interested in three-ways. Jackson was the only part of him that wasn’t ashamed to be gay. I thought of Jackson when evangelical leader Ted Haggard and his three-year relationship with a gay hooker made the headlines.

Actually, the column is a pretty good read. We whole-heartedly agree that Pastor Ted should be welcomed with more than open arms into the gay community.

Legitimate news source: Hot bottom off the market

Damn, they're kicking themselves in the pants right now. The kids at Q-Bomb were too slow on the uptake to grab the meal ticket while the getting was good. Ted Haggard has said gone into rehab, according to the CO Springs Gazette. It's not the good kind that treats people who compulsively waste crystal meth, but the bad kind that tries to make men out of nancy-boys.

So it seems like the the only guy who will get to tap that evangelical ass is Mike Post.