Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Where are they now? Ted Haggard edition

Remember Ted Haggard, the evangelical pastor at a Colorado mega-church whose fall from grace involved meth and a gay prostitute? Well, he's resurfaced recently as it's come out that his church has been paying off a boy who had a three-year relationship with Pastor Ted that started when the boy was 18. So, where is he now?

Well, former Pastor Ted has two things going on in his life. For one, he's the subject of an HBO special. But on a more mundane level, the NYT gives a great one-sentence synopsis of his life since the ordeal:

In an interview with The Associated Press this month, Mr. Haggard said he was selling insurance and debt-reduction software and that his sexual identity was hard to pin down.

Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic explains why we should all care about the fact that Ted Haggard had to lie about his sexuality:

The countless gay men who are currently running many of the world's leading Christian denominations are threats to themselves, to other gay men, to their wives and their churches because ancient doctrine forces them into twisted shells of human beings. In the Catholic church, this led to a horrifying epidemic of child abuse, protected and enabled by the last two Popes. And their response to this? To ratchet up the psychological pressure even further on the men whose psyches and souls they have already permanently warped.

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