The Rev. Ted Haggard, influential Colorado evangelical leader, resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals last week and confessed yesterday that he was guilty of “sexual immorality” after a former gay male prostitute alleged that the two had a three-year sexual relationship.
Haggard’s resignation comes only weeks after Mark Foley, the Republican congressman from Florida and co-chairman of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus, was forced to step down in scandal over the discovery that he sent sexually explicit Internet messages to young male pages. Haggard, a Republican who regularly participated in conference calls with White House officials in the Bush administration, is an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriages, and the National Association of Evangelicals claims to be on the front lines of the fight against what it terms “the crisis of homosexual marriage.”
And so another prominent Republican who regularly spoke out against homosexuality is “having gay sex behind people’s backs,” in the words of Haggard’s accuser, Michael Jones.
Jones decided to go public with his allegations after “the federal marriage amendment came up before the Senate earlier this year; I wanted to see the stance of his church, and the more I read about it, the angrier I got.” Is anyone besides Jones surprised at the galling hypocrisy of the Republican Party? No, not really, is the unhappy answer: Not when President Bush was elected on a platform of “compassionate conservatism” that turned out to be neither compassionate nor conservative.
Not when pain-killer addict and professional loudmouth Rush Limbaugh mocked Michael J. Fox’s struggle with Parkinson’s disease. Not when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered the media to “back off” and toe the official administration line on Iraq, then secretly planned to keep 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq until at least 2010. This is not to excuse Democratic hypocrites like former President Bill Clinton, who similarly declared he did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky before admitting that he did – but Clinton never made a political issue out of outlawing cigars or blue dresses, either.
In a way, one can only feel a certain pity for Haggard, Foley and the other closeted gay Republicans, who are under constant pressure from the radical religious right wing of the party – Karl Rove’s most loyal acolytes – to denounce at all times all things homosexual.
In last week’s USA Today, for example, the group Catholic Answers ignored mainstream Catholic opinion and published a partisan, pro-Republican “Voters Guide for Serious Catholics,” which described homosexual marriage as “intrinsically evil … [and] non-negotiable.” Earlier this year, IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson said that dozens of IRS investigations found that churches or charities had engaged in prohibited, almost wholly pro-Republican, political behavior in the 2004 elections.
Less than a month ago, churches were again accused of improperly endorsing Republican congressional candidates. Unsurprisingly, the radical religious right never mentions Jesus’ true message of the brotherhood of humanity and the need for social justice. After all, addressing equal rights, discrimination or our nation’s growing economic disparity between poor and hyper-rich would alarm the moneyed interests that back Bush and the Republican Party and expose the marriage of convenience between the party’s religious and business wings. Instead, Republicans rely on the traditional triumvirate of “God, guns and gays,” which won them success in 2004.
Ironically, in the documentary Jesus Camp, Haggard declares, “We don’t have to debate about what we should think about homosexual activity. It’s written in the Bible.” The radical religious right should also note what else is written in the Bible: We should love our neighbors, heterosexual or homosexual alike, as we love ourselves.
Cyrus Hadadi is a senior electrical engineering, history and mathematics major. He can be reached at chadadi@yahoo.com.
