Oh, all right. I’ll say a few things about this Reverand Haggard thing [1], although what really there is to say I’m not sure. Those caught up in the spell of an evangelist community may not care–this is just another example of how rotten-to-the-core sinful human beings are and even the best of us just can’t overcome the demons.
Frankly, it’s boring. Swaggart, Bakker, now this guy, among many others…I am reminded of the preacher in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath who gave up the Call because he couldn’t keep his hands off the women. He had the integrity, finally, to realize who he was and stop being a hypocrite.
But it seems that hypocrisy is just reinforcing for people like Haggard and his followers, the more the better, because it validates their committment to the cause. It never seems to occur to them to step back and ask if, given that no matter how hard they pray or how much money they throw in the till or how many times they repent they remain pretty much as they started out, perhaps the assumptions being made aren’t just a bit, well, wrong.
I’ve seen these born again gays on talk shows announcing that Christ “cured” them of their homosexuality and I wince. It is indeed possible to shove yourself into a straitjacket and distort yourself to the point of being your own polar opposite. Many of us may have found it necessary to do something like this for a short while just to deal with a given situation. But over the longterm all it does is cripple the one in the iron lady. They haven’t changed themselves so much as created their own condition of extreme neurotic denial, forced themselves to the point of breakdown, and become an enemy of their own natures.
For what?
Senator Mark Foley was a rabid anti-child porn advocate. He was passionate, committed, a real zealot. It surprised me not at all that it turned out he had a proclivity for sexual advances on the very people he was working to protect from people like himself. It was as if, were he successful in changing the entire world and the whole sexual landscape and somehow eliminating everything he was working to eliminate, then he would no longer suffer–take away the temptation and he might never be tempted.
It’s like an alcoholic who expects everyone around him/her to refrain from drinking so he/she won’t want one. Or a smoker who does the same. For the most part, people would accommodate these people.
But what if it’s a born again vegetarian who demands that no one around them eat meat so that they can more easily refrain? (I once knew a man who blamed rock’n’roll for ruining his life and insisted that none of it be played around him anymore so he would never be tempted to pick up a guitar again.)
Now, certainly that last is a bit on the silly side, but my point is that people like Foley and Haggard have a tendency to make everyone else bear the moral responsibility for what they see as their own failing of character. The reverend–any of them–probably thought that in the world they’d want to live in, the prostitute simply wouldn’t be there to take their money and make them feel awful. That way they couldn’t sin because there would be no opportunity–everyone else would make sure of it.
Pass The Buck Morality. It’s pathetic. Not only for the hypocrisy and arrogance, but because, often, the thing being condemned is not necessarily condemnable.
Homosexuality is simply another way of being sexual. The pernicious canard that sex is only and ever for procreation fuels the over-the-top rhetoric of those condemning it. I wonder how many of them actually believe that–or practice it. Sex between humans is far more than that, but somehow this frightens certain people. And those most frightened of it seem, often, to be those most bent on stealing the fun from everyone else.
The self-loathing of such people is dangerous. Dangerous to the rest of us who don’t buy into their moral churnings. Because they become zealous in trying to make sure no one indulges the thing they fear so that they will never be tempted. Rather than change their own life, they think they have to change everyone else’s.
All I want to say to such people, in the end, is: get over yourself.
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