An awful story has managed to get even more pathetic. (via K.Z. and K.M.)
Rev. Ted Haggard emerged from three weeks of intensive counseling convinced he is “completely heterosexual” and told an oversight board that his sexual contact with men was limited to his accuser. That is according to one of the disgraced pastor’s overseers, who on Monday revealed new details about where Haggard has been and where he is headed.
Among other things, the overseers urged Haggard to enter a 12-step program for sexual addiction, Ware said.
Ralph said three weeks of counseling at an undisclosed Arizona treatment center helped Haggard immensely and left Haggard sure of one thing.
“He is completely heterosexual,” Ralph said. “That is something he discovered. It was the acting- out situations where things took place. It wasn’t a constant thing.”
I’m afraid I’m a little confused. I’m hardly an expert in such matters, but on the one hand, Haggard was afflicted with a sexual “addiction,” which led to a gay affair. At the same time, Haggard was also allegedly completely heterosexual, his gay sex was limited to one person, and it “wasn’t a constant thing.”
I’m not interested in the prurient details, but how is it an occasional affair with one person constitutes a “sex addiction”?
Actually, never mind; it doesn’t matter. This whole charade is a bad joke. No serious person can believe that a man can be buying meth, having gay sex with a prostitute, and lying to everyone he cares about in November, and be fully “rehabilitated” in early February after three weeks of “therapy.”
As Andrew Sullivan put it:
Let’s put it this way: even the quacks behind reparative therapy for homosexuals do not believe a few weeks of therapy will do the trick. (A few years and you can function heterosexually without wanting to kill yourself.) And so the psychological and spiritual abuse that Haggard has imposed on others and is now imposing on himself continues for another cycle of denial and pathology. And that is what, sadly, a great deal of Christian fundamentalism is caught up in: a vortex of denial of reality and rigid psychological resistance to self-acceptance. It is, in my view, a fear-gripped rejection of the beneficence and compassion of God, not an openness toward the divine. It’s a therapy that is actually an illness. And Haggard is getting sicker.
As for Haggard’s future, his friends in Colorado Springs have effectively told him, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
In the message, Haggard revealed that he and his wife, Gayle, intend to leave Colorado Springs and pursue master’s degrees through online courses.
Haggard mentioned Missouri and Iowa as possible destinations. Another oversight board member, the Rev. Mike Ware of Westminster, said the group recommended the move out of town, and the Haggards agreed.
How very, very sad.