Wednesday, November 08, 2006

When Your Right Wing Evangelical Leader Is Probably Gay

More on the election thing tomorrow and Friday.

Wanted to touch base again on the Ted Haggard scandal.

American conservative Christians are sort of fixated on sex. Maybe that’s not a revelation :^)

When a religious movement that purports to follow Jesus gets too fascinated with the homo or hetero jiggy while downplaying service to the poor and remaining largely silent about challenging the love of money you know something has gotten pretty spiritually out of whack

Hard to imagine what it would be like to be one of the leaders of the American evangelical movement and also be gay, or at least struggling to come to terms with your sexual orientation. I truly feel for Haggard.

Currrent Republican politics is based in part on bashing gays. Most of these evangelical and fundamentalist leaders support right wing Republican causes in an almost knee-jerk fashion.

James Dobson, the disturbing (to me) evangelical head of Focus on the Family, sent an email to voters across the state of Colorado a few days ago. He wanted to ‘out’ Democratic congressional Ed Perlmutter because Perlmutter allowed gay people to participate in his political campaign.

The combination of current fundamentalist sexual and political fixations strikes me as pretty unhealthy. Fundamentalism has always been about a black and white, simple-minded escape from the real world. Tempting, but a dead end nonetheless.

How could any person struggling to make sense of their sexual orientation feel the slightest freedom to speak honestly in that kind of church environment?

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Surely every era is an era of hypocrisy, but it is hard to remember when that has been more evident than the last few years. Bill Benet, "Virtue Czar", is revealed as a obsessive gambler losing tens of thousands of dollars in casinos. Merciless, anti-addict Rush Limbaugh is outed as a drug addict and illegal drug user twice! Literally a dozen lawmakers like Bob Ney and Tom Delay are confirmed law breakers. Anti-internet predator Tom Foley is revealed to be one himself. Now we have a gay-hooker-consorting, meth using evangelical leader. Americans truly hate hypocrisy (in others) and I believe that has something to do with the current backlash against conservatives
I read a (sick and disturbing) interview with the gay-hooker in question and then read the posts of the primarily "godless liberal" bloggers. He said that "you'd be surprised how many ministers and church leaders" procure his services and that he is perfectly fine with that. It was when Haggard repeatedly made such an issue of fighting gay marriage, "an arrangement he had all the benefits of", that the man went to the press.
These liberal bloggers repeatedly said things to the effect of "I'd feel sorry for this guy if he hadn't used to his power so much to hurt [gay] people like himself..."
It is an almost parabolic reversal when a gay drug-dealing hooker is acknowledged as having more integrity than a leader of your church.
Ozymandias

6:54 AM  
Blogger Wordcat said...

Important stuff, Ozy.

Self hatred is an important factor in fundamentalist religion.

Jesus went a lot easier on the gay escorts of this world than he did on the harsh and self-righteous.

7:11 PM  
Blogger Samer Farhat said...

A crisp 2 dollar bill says Haggard writes a book to capitalize on all of this mess. It may even be a book worth reading, but I'm not willing to bet on that one.

10:28 PM  

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