It Was Only a Matter of Time…

…before someone tacitly blamed Haggard’s wife for his moral collapse, and right on cue, here it is.

Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.

Yeah, if only Mrs. Haggard had navigated that virgin-whore dichotomy a little better, Pastor Ted never would have sought solace in the massage stylings of a male escort. Also, I bet if she’d shaved her pussy, he never would have bought that meth.

And, you know, in addition to making sure their wives steadily deliver the poon on demand, pastors should probably just stop ministering to women and giving them important roles in the church, too, less those dirty temptresses seduce God’s men right out of their cloth.

I spend the vast majority of my time working from home. Some years ago when I did not, I found that lonely people, some of them hurting single moms wanting a strong man to speak into their life, would show up to hang out and catch time with me. It was shortly thereafter that I brought my books home and purchased a laptop and cell phone so that I was not tied to the church office. …Pastors have the right to protect their own home. This means that if someone keeps dropping by unannounced and is unwelcome, or a flirtatious woman shows up to a Bible study at the pastor’s home, the pastor and his family have the right to request that they never return.

…Churches should consider returning to heterosexual male assistants who are like Timothy and Titus to serve alongside pastors. Too often the pastor’s assistant is a woman who, if not sexually involved, becomes too emotionally involved with the pastor as a sort of emotional and practical second wife. I have been blessed with a trustworthy heterosexual male assistant who can travel with me, meet with me, etc., without the fear of any temptations or even false allegations since we have beautiful wives and eight children between us.

Consider that all of this was written in response to the Haggard scandal. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the temptations of women weren’t Ted Haggard’s problem. And herein lies the fundamental problem with regarding same-sex attraction as no different than attraction to other people of the opposite sex for straight ministers: All the sex in the world provided by a wife isn’t going to eradicate sexual desires for men, and the expected resistence of a heterosexual male assistant to sexual overtures doesn’t magically render him unattractive to someone who’s attracted to men. Is this really so difficult to understand? It’s like suggesting I can’t find Paul the Spud a handsome lad because I know he’s gay. He’s a man, and I’m attracted to men. That’s all it takes.

It’s quite astounding to see the cognitive dissonance at work here. This minister is so desperate to protect himself from his innate (hetero)sexual urges that he has insulated himself from single moms, flirtatious women, and female assistants, lest he succumb to temptation, indicating a powerful and inescapable force within him. (One I would argue seems strangely disproportionate to my experience, but wev.) Yet at the same time, he doesn’t seem able to grasp that same-sex attraction is just as complex and intractable. In no way does he give the impression he believes his heterosexuality is curable, or even easily manageable—the world is full of temptations that are avoidable only with the assistance of a well-kept woman who provides frequent and satisfying sex.

The evidence of his own experience should suggest to him that same-sex attraction is no less obstinate, but he deliberately ignores the evidence provided by his own body and mind to assert that homosexuality (or bisexuality) is not a legitimate and equal sexual predisposition to his own, but instead a choice, and a bad one at that. It’s mind-numbingly obtuse.

One would think that people who were so rigidly sure of the inflexibility of their sexual orientation would be the most open to the concept that sexuality is not normally a choice. Instead, they fixate on the dogmatic but unproved belief that same-sex attraction is something that can be fixed, and seem quite certain if they say it often enough, one day it might be true.

(Hat tip to Blue Gal, who got it from Mock, Paper, Scissors.)