The Haggard MetaStory

[elfs]

Christine Rizk writes in The Revealer about Ted Haggard's fall from grace and asks when people will recognize the "real story":

The story here is about all the closeted gay evangelicals who can't come out because their religion forbids their "perversion." It's about these men who have to clandestinely have sex with strangers or prostitutes, and who then go home to their wives and children. It's about an epidemic of closeted gay men having to get high on methamphetamines to have sex, to drown out the voice that tells them what they're doing is wrong. It's about how their families have to cope if "the secret" ever gets found out.

It's a futile question: evangelical Christianity has a totalizing worldview that can easily encapsulate Haggard's homosexuality. It's the same one the Catholic Church has had for centuries: homosexuality is a sin, it's a temptation, and some men are more attracted to it than others, just as some men are more attracted to the bottle or the gambling table or just plain promiscuity in general than they are to other vices. It is Haggard's responsibility to acknowledge his vice, his "special test," and to live with it within the context of a religious belief that, to the best of our knowledge, he still holds absolutely. Haggard may be a hypocrite, but the Evangelicals understand hypocrisy correctly: it is what happens when one community has difficult standards (I hesitate in this case to call them "high standards") that human beings cannot uniformily and easily live with. In the case of evangelicals, Haggard's fall fits so neatly into the hypocrisy of the fallen narrative that it cannot do aught else. The consequences of his hypocrisy, which include possibly harming his family, are in line with their belief that sin may affect others ewen when it infects only one.