Moon phase: Full moon
Weather: Cold and windy
Phenology: Maples are turning
Yet again, another right-wing asshole who's been calling queers immoral and fighting against same-sex marriage has been outed as gay himself. Ted Haggard always seemed ultra-creepy to me — I first saw him in Tom Brokaw's series on Evangelism in America last year, and more recently I saw him in Richard Dawkins' The Root of All Evil (where he summed up evolution as an "accident" and then kicked Dawkins out for "calling [his] children animals"). I thought he was a typical, deranged Fundie. But I'm not surprised that he's gay. It's true again and again that the most virulent homophobes are so up in arms about it because they're gay themselves: their religion has convinced them that they're perverted sinners, so they hate themselves, and then they take all that hate that's focused inward and spew it out to the rest of us in the form of sermons.
I was once a homophobe myself. I was just going along with my friends, agreeing with them that it was sick and weird, and I didn't react well at the age of 13 when a friend came out to me. But I started to realize that the reason that the idea of queerness so disturbed me was that it felt so familiar. I got over my fear and disgust and started questioning myself, and finally came out. But then, I had it easy — I was raised in a religion that accepted queers, in a time when it was becoming more open and tolerated, and I had several queer friends in high school, so it was simple to move past my initial disgust and realize that there was nothing wrong with it. Someone raised in homophobic religion and community, at a time when it was considered abnormal and queers led hidden lives, would have a much harder time coming to terms with their own queerness. Ted Haggard's confession is very illuminating in that regard:
The fact is I am guilty of sexual immorality. And I take responsibility for the entire problem. 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.
It's interesting to note that something he finds arousing would also repulse him. And in a way I feel bad for him that he's still living within this world-view that condemns his very nature as egregious sin. I can't imagine the constant pain of truly believing there's something wrong with you, something that God will punish you for, just because you're gay.
But all the same he's used his position as a highly-respected pastor to fan the flames of hatred, and most especially to fight against queer rights. It's sad that this is all just his own internalized homophobia, that he has been, in essence, waging a war on himself. But I think of all the damage he's done by encouraging and spreading homophobia and my empathy just evaporates. There's a rule in the queer community that you don't out someone unless they're using the closet to harm other queers. This is a man that truly deserved to be outed.
Update 2/10: Ted Haggard has now announced that after three weeks of counseling, he is "completely heterosexual", according to the Denver Post. My reaction is twofold: 1) Three weeks?! There's no way you can complete any sort of counseling in such a short time, and especially not "reparative therapy"; ex-gays usually report years of therapy before their supposed change. 2) Ex-gays are a complete and total fraud. Now, I'm not one to claim I know what others are really feeling, but it's easy to employ Occam's razor here and see that it's much, much, much more likely that ex-gays are just fooling themselves, or outright lying, than that they have stumbled upon the magic cure that has eluded the millions of other hetero-wannabes over the years. Especially considering their political/religious motivations for their claims, and the number of ex-gays that have later admitted it was a fraud and finally embraced their queerness. I can only hope that Ted Haggard will eventually come to such a place, but more likely he'll just continue lying to himself and the rest of the world.
