Fiat Lux

Is it the gently wafting odor of hypocrisy?

“I want my finances in order, my kids trained, and my wife to love life. I want good friends who are a delight and who provide protection for my family and me should life become difficult someday . . . I don't want surprises, scandals, or secrets . . .

-- Rev. Ted Haggard, Senior Pastor of New Life Church, as reported in Harpers Magazine.

The president of the U.S. National Association of Evangelicals, who has had regular talks with the White House and vocally opposes gay marriage, resigned on Thursday after being accused of having a sexual relationship with a male escort.

Ted Haggard, who denied the accusation, also temporarily stepped down as senior pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, the church said in a statement.

-- Yahoo! News.

Echinde isn't wrong when she suggests that it might not be the right thing to be calling out this man's private imperfections. We're none of us free from flaws, myself least of all.

But I do think that when you have someone who is such a significant part of the moralizing Christianist forces that want to reshape the world in their image, and that person that turns out to be secretly fond of those 'sins' (their words, not mine) he castigates in public, he deserves to be called on it.

UPDATE 11/6: Tristero weighs in:

To defend hypocrisy of the sort that Ted Haggard practiced, where he went out of his way to preach that perfectly normal behavior is a deep sin while repeatedly, and in secret, enjoying the behavior himself, is to advocate precisely the kind of moral relativism the right accuses liberals of practicing (but we don't). There is nothing shameful about same-sex attraction and there is nothing morally wrong with two consenting adults doing whatever intimate acts they both enjoy. Haggard's hypocrisy was not that he hid an immoral act. It is that he enjoyed his perfectly normal desires while enthusiastically preaching the lie that they are abnormal