aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Haggard restoration

Ted Haggard’s going into spiritual restoration. This is what those who claim to cure homosexuality brag about:

“I see success approximately 50 percent of the time,” said H.B. London, vice president for church and clergy at Focus on the Family, the conservative Christian ministry in Colorado Springs. “Guys just wear out and they can no longer subject themselves to the process.”

Those who fail “end up selling cars or shoes or something, and being miserable and angry the rest of their lives,” London said.

Some success, eh? And don’t you just love the loving way they embrace those who try but fail?

Yesterday I listened to Monday’s Open Source on Homosexuality and the American church. This comment is from Jeff Sharlet, who wrote the May 2005 Harper’s piece on Haggard’s church:

This whole idea of purity as a way in which you can become a real activist in the cause. You might not be out there protesting outside an abortion clinic, or going out on a mission trip, but you are sort of conducting a mission trip in your own genitals. Driving lust out from your body the way Christ drives the demons out. And it makes everyone feel like, wow, I’m a part of something big…And the reason that the gay man looms so large is because, in their imagination, he’s the one who gives into his temptations entirely…The gay man, he’s not even procreating, it’s just about him, it’s just about pleasure, it’s just selfishness.

And here’s Mel White saying what we all know to be true about gays in the church:

It’s the old Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. We are in every level of the church, and in every position. There are so many gay pastors and priests, gay congregants, gay deacons, gay elders. You know, we are everywhere in the church serving Christ well, and I think, wisely. But the only way we can do that is to build our service on a lie. And that’s really sad.