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The Ted Haggard Movement Airs Its Shame
Depending on which side of the theological divide you happen to fall, Ted Haggard is either a hypocritical, hate-mongering, self-hating pervert and sexual deviant, or simply a good man who gave in to temptation and is now being vilified by those who hate Christians. By now, I shouldn’t have to tell you where I fall (except that I don’t hate Christians) . Ted Haggard is without a doubt a hypocrite, a fool, and a despot who has been more than willing to condemn others for engaging in the very behavior he had been secretly engaging in himself.
It’s not a sin when I do it….
When outed, his response was a tepid apology that seemed crafted only to lull his parishioners into believing that he was in fact the victim. What a load of self-serving crap….
[Mike] Jones, 49 and a self-admitted gay man all his life, told talk show host Peter Boyles on radio station KHOW he believes Haggard has “more demons and dirt” he needs to clean out.
On Sunday, church overseers read to the congregation a letter of apology from Haggard, which Jones called “hollow.”
“If I was going to issue an apology, it would be a paragraph long,” Jones said. “He was definitely pulling the emotional strings for his followers.”
Jones said he had sex monthly with Haggard for three years, ending in August. From those sexual encounters, Jones said he believes Haggard is a homosexual, despite having a wife and five children.
“Ted, you need to be honest with yourself,” Jones said over the air. “If you’re a gay man, you’re a gay man.”
If Ted Haggard is worthy of sympathy and rehabilitation, then Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader should win the next Nobel Peace Prize. Haggard is not someone whose live simply headed in the right direction. He’s a man who has long held himself up as a shining beacon of righteous rectitude. He has vociferously and loudly condemned homosexuality as a sin and those who engage in homosexuality as the worst sort of sinner. Then it turns out that he’s been paying a male prostitute to grease his pole for the past three years. Nice, eh?
Throughout Focus on the Family’s broadcast on the Ted Haggard scandal this Monday, James Dobson and his guests took special care to distance themselves from Haggard while unwittingly empathizing with their disgraced former ally’s submission to what he called his “dark and repulsive” desires.
Syndicated radio host Ravi Zacharias confessed that he had cried himself to sleep the night before (“I’ve been weepy all day,” Dobson interjected).
Spare me the crocodile tears….
Zacharias then related an unintentionally hilarious tale about a trip by Rev. Billy Graham to Paris in the early 1960’s.
According to Zacharias, Graham wandered the Left Bank one night after delivering a sermon and witnessed “all this nightilfe available to him.” But rather than succumb to temptation, Graham locked himself in his hotel room and left the key outside. Thanks to this bold tactic, he survived the night without morphing into a black-bereted existentialist.
If only Ted Haggard’s battle was as simple and straightforward as Graham’s. The problem here is that Haggard, while apparently battling his own demons, has for years roundly condemned those who engage in the very behavior he skulked around secretly indulging in himself. If there’s one thing I cannot stand, it’s that sort of rank hypocrisy. To my way of thinking, that is just about the most unforgivable thing imaginable.
Imagine what his irresponsible, reprehensible, and self-absorbed duplicity is putting his wife and children through? Imagine having to deal with the reality that your husband or father is a liar, a hypocrite, and a deceiver? Forgiveness and rehabilitation seem to things that Haggard deserves in no shape, manner, or form.
Haggard had his shot, and he blew it…no pun intended. That he represents everything that is wrong with Christianity today almost goes without saying. That he deserves a special place in Hell does not.
