Lies, Damned Lies, and Religion

Just when I thought my week was going badly.

Ted Haggard, the leader of a large evangelical church, the New Life Church, finally admits, after an initial denial, that he's had some kind of "lifelong" sexual problem. It all started with an out of work personal trainer saying that Haggard had paid him to have sex with him for three years. Haggard initially denied this, but then later admitted, vaguely, to being a "deceiver and a liar" and also admitted to having purchased, but not used, methamphetamines from the trainer.

He was fired from his position as leader of the church, but apparently this was done in a "loving" way. His congregants, at least, seem to still have some fondness for him:

"I probably cried all morning," [one congregant] said. "He knows he's hurt us and it hurts when your brother has done something, but like Pastor Ross said, he's in a good place -- he's better off this week than he was last week -- and he will receive the healing he needs and he did a good thing for our church so that we can heal."

A pretty gentle fall, all things considered. Donald Rumsfeld, take note.

My queer cents on this whole thing:

1) This was really skillful use of the media by Mike Jones, the trainer who outed Haggard. As Larry Gross noted back in 1993, in his book Contested Closets:

[t]he involuntary exposure of closeted homosexuals was long a favored tactic of social control threatened and employed by our enemies. The adoption of outing as a political tactic has challenged their ability to determine the meaning of gay identity and the consequences of its visibility.

Jones was not a trained spokesperson, but he recognized that he had the opportunity to expose hypocrisy where he found it (Haggard had come out in support of an anti-same-sex marriage measure in Colorado). Sex worker ethics aside, what he did was pretty savvy, and his statements to the media make him sound like your Gay-Man-On-The-Street. It's refreshing to see a religious figure backpedalling wildly while an out gay man is portrayed as the indignant voice of reason.

2) I feel rather sorry for Haggard, of course. The man is doing crystal meth, for goodness' sakes. This is not the kind of drug you do when you're loving life. You might say he had it coming (and he did), but I still can't help but feel sympathy for the man. Unfortunately, it looks like he's going to continue making himself miserable for some time to come, saying that his (homo, presumably) sexuality is something "so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life." The tragically divided self is alive and well in evangelical America.

3) Who has Haggard wronged? In his own eyes, he has sinned against God. In the eyes of the non-evangelical public, he has harmed us with his hypocrisy (however indirectly), by shaking our faith in religious figures to practice what they preach. In the eyes of those jaded queers who still watch these events with interest, there is little surprise or injury in the hypocrisy (which we have come to expect). His real sin is homophobia. Public humiliation repays this debt that he owed us even before we discovered he himself had some desires for same-sex intimacy. Why do I speak of debts? Here's a passage from On The Genealogy of Morals (essay II section 4) that has informed my thoughts on this:

Throughout the greater part of human history, punishment was not imposed because one held the wrongdoer responsible for his deed, thus not on the presupposition that only the guilty one should be punished: rather, as parents still punish their children, from anger at some harm or injury, vented on the one who caused it - but this anger is held in check and modified by the idea that every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid back, even if only through the pain of the culprit. And whence did this primeval, deeply rooted, perhaps by now ineradicable idea draw its power - this idea of an equivalence between injury and pain? I have already divulged it: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the idea of "legal subjects" and in turn points back to the fundamental forms of buying, selling, barter, trade and traffic.

So you see, it all comes back to Contracts. One has to wonder what payback is going to be for Mike Jones (not to us, of course, he hasn't wronged us)

I'm reminded of this apropriately Christian joke about a lawyer, a surgeon and an engineer arguing about whose profession is the oldest. The surgeon says that his profession is the oldest because God created Eve from Adam's rib. The engineer says that in fact his profession is the oldest because even before that, God had to build the world out of the chaos. The lawyer smiles and asks, rhetorically, "Ah, but who do you think created the chaos?"

By the way, in case you hadn't already heard, Dougie Howser is also gay. As is this other baby-faced TV-doc.