Twinkies, Cockroaches and Evangelists

Three things that will survive no matter what:

Ted Haggard returns to the pulpit in Colorado
The disgraced former pastor is back in Colorado Springs, and his home prayer meetings have drawn an unexpected audience. 'I love a good redemption story,' a supporter says.
By DeeDee Correll
December 7, 2009
Reporting from
Colorado Springs, Colo. - Ted Haggard climbed onto a bale of hay, Bible balanced in his palm."Welcome to my barn," he called out."Does anybody need a blanket?" his wife, Gayle, inquired as men and women in down coats shivered in the frigid November air. Some huddled underneath a space heater.Then the blue-jeans-clad preacher began chanting: "God is good, God is good, God is good."

This musty barn next to the Haggard home is barely two miles -- but a universe away -- from the massive stage the former evangelical star once occupied at New Life Church. There, he would appear every Sunday before microphones, giant television screens and a congregation so large that services had to be held in shifts.But in late 2006 came what Haggard, now 53, refers to as "the crisis," the revelation that he'd had a sexual relationship with a male escort. Haggard resigned from the church he had started in his basement 25 years ago and left Colorado Springs.

I guess what Roy Zimmerman says really is true, that or he has found a congregation of hardcore born again true believers who don't care where he puts his weiner, just as long as he does a good job being a cheerleader for Jesus.

Just to be clear, I don't care where he puts his weiner. The less I know about what Ted Haggard does when he feels the need to get his freak on, the better. But one does not get to live in the glass house while telling everyone who will hold still long enough to listen to get out there and throw rocks at everyone else's crystal palace. He got caught doing what he has spent his career condemning, that is why he has become a punchline. It's like catching Jenny Craig with her head in a trough of ice cream, or Ralph Nader selling used Pintos.

I don't care that Ted Haggard is gay, I care that he has spent his entire career telling people to hate gays and applying political pressure - including through his regular private chats with the last president of the United States - to deny homosexuals civil rights. If he were straight, this would be bad enough - it's wrong to deny someone equal rights on the basis of who they like to do the horizontal hula with assuming everyone involved is a consenting adult - but he was condemning homosexuality as evil, while hiding the fact that he was shacking up with a male prostitute. That is what makes him an uber douchebag.