Who Knew?
Timing is everything. Just a couple of days ago I posted about the documentary “Jesus Camp” and one of its more disturbing characters, Ted Haggard. As it turns out, to borrow an old phrase, he may have rendering unto Caesar in the most biblical sense of that expression.
As we learn from the Washington Post:
One of the nation’s most influential conservative Christian leaders, the Rev. Ted Haggard, resigned yesterday as president of the National Association of Evangelicals and temporarily stepped aside as pastor of a Colorado mega-church after a self-described male escort accused him of paying for gay sex.
Haggard, an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage, vigorously denied the allegation. “Never had a gay relationship with anybody, and I’m steady with my wife. I’m faithful to my wife,” he told a Colorado television station, KUSA.
One needn’t look too hard to discover a Clintonesque parsing of “Never had a gay relationship with anybody, and I’m steady with my wife. I’m faithful to my wife” (and yes, I agree the expression Clintonesque is most unfortunate in this context).
But I’ll leave sentence parsing to the sentence parsers. My point is that the right’s obsession with homosexuality leads straight to their downfall. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that their embrace of the fundamentalist sect of Christianity leads them to an inescapable schism: those who are shunned are also the shunners. There are gay men and lesbians both within the fundamentalist base, as well as the Republican party as a whole. Yet, instead of preaching the gospel of mutual acceptance, they appear to preach the gospel of self-hatred.
Speaking of which, I heard a very interesting interview with James Moore, author of Bush’s Brain, an account of Karl Rove’s lifelong jihad against the Democratic party. He has a new book out on Karl, with some details on Rove’s relationship to his father:
But there was an argument that ensued behind closed doors, and Louis Rove left, and he was not there for Christmas Day, which also happens to be Karl’s birthday. And it turned out many years later that Louis — not many years later. Many years later I found out about it. But Louis Rove went to Los Angeles and decided to live openly as a gay man. He had been gay all of his life, but had repressed it and had tried to live as a heterosexual, but he decided to live the second half of his life openly as a gay man.
He retired to Palm Springs, California. And when he passed away, there was no — his friends, many retired gay men there who were close friends with Louis Rove, were unaware of any memorial service. Karl has taken exception with what my book says, that there was no public memorial service. Karl indicates I’m trying to claim that there was no service at all whatsoever. That’s not the case. However, it seems as though Karl was trying to suppress and continues to suppress the notion that and the fact that the man who raised him, a man who he has said he had a loving, open, honest relationship with, was, in fact, a gay man.
Karl buried his father Louie Rove in July of 2004. There was no public notice in the newspaper. And then he got on the campaign plane, and he went to eleven key swing states to help facilitate the anti-gay marriage amendment around this country, which drove turnout in the last election.
Well, there’s enough in those dozen lines to keep an armchair psychologist busy for years. I’ll leave it at this: it’s said that what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. Not necessarily. What doesn’t kill you can continue to eat you for years, driving you psychotically.
