Haggard Confesses to Lifelong “Sexual Problem”

C&L has a video snippet of Haggard’s letter to his church being read, in which he confesses to the little lifelong “sexual problem” most of us refer to as “being gay.” Most of us doesn’t include Pastor Ted, though, who still resides in his twisted world of fantastic delusion, where homosexuality is just a fancy name for a sexual temptation that can be overcome with enough prayer and diligence.

According to a spokesman for the church that has now canned his ass, Pastor Ted continues to deny “engaging in homosexual acts or being gay,” admitting only having received a massage from a gay man, which was cited as the grounds for his removal. And in true self-loathing closet case fashion, he used his admission of being “a deceiver and a liar” as an opportunity to further malign the LGBT community, by treating homosexuality as the epitome of depravity:

"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 all my adult life," he said.

Oh, go fuck yourself, you sanctimonious shit. There’s nothing “repulsive” or “dark” about being gay. What’s repulsive is your chronic compulsion to slander gays, and I believe you’ll find the world a lot less dark if you just step out of that closet in which you’ve been hiding.

Haggard is, to be sure, a pitiable creature, another victim of the so-called morality that casts same-sex attraction as a conquerable bit of devilry, like the offer of a rich dessert during a post-holiday diet. Oh, I really shouldn’t…well, maybe just one bite… Wholly disregarded are all the parts of the human experience that flow from attraction—love, family, fulfillment. Requiring people to hide and deny one of the most fundamental aspects of their natures necessarily causes them to seek out a sad approximation, and they take down with them second-choice spouses, children, and the friends and family who inevitably become entwined in their lifelong lie until it unravels. There’s nothing moral about that.

But given the chance to extricate himself from this large and spectacular life of deceit, Haggard balked. He chose not to explain himself for what he is, a gay man cosseted in expectations of self-delusion, but instead to further condemn the people who are brave enough not to cower behind a curtain of deception—the out LGBT community who live lives that are “repulsive and dark.” Even as his treachery and hypocrisy are nakedly exposed, he cannot tell the truth, even to himself. Still he speaks of temptation, and seeks redemption not from those he has endeavored to destroy as part of his self-denial, but from those who only love him cloaked in that lie, who destroyed him.

There is, perhaps, no greater evidence that homosexuality is not a choice, not an inducement to sin against a singular goodness, than people like Haggard—people who have every reason not to be gay, who have every alleged tool at their disposal to counter the “wicked urge,” and fail nonetheless. It is in people like Haggard that we see the truth behind the assertions that gay marriage will undermine the family, that gays recruit, that unchecked homosexuality will be ruinous for society—because Haggard’s family might not have existed were gay marriage legal, because Haggard felt as though he were being tugged astray by every out gay man he saw, because the existence of homosexuality, as just another shade on the spectrum of human experience, was ruinous for him.

Haggard believes even now he is fighting a demon, something outside of himself that, given enough willpower, enough moral rectitude, enough prayer, he can vanquish. He cannot bring himself to admit, and to tell the millions who share his view and watch with horror his fall from grace, that he is wrong, that they’re all wrong, that he’s fighting himself.