Remember Ted Haggard? He was that charismatically creepy head pastor of the gigantic Colorado Springs New Life Church. (You can always recognize a megachurch if it looks like a Costco and the preacher wears a head-mounted microphone like Hannah Montana.) Anyway, if you remember Ted, chances are you also remember how he left the church after it was discovered he'd been doing meth and various other deeds with a male prostitute. Good times. Although Haggard was supposedly "cured" of his homosexuality by his church's three-week intensive gay cleansing ritual (I've heard a big part of the course is having to look at life-sized photographs of a naked Don Rickles), it looks like he wasn't quite cured enough. The new head pastor has issued a letter explaining that Ted isn't fully "restored" and will have to sit out returning to his old job for a while. Looks like the members of the New Life Church are as skeptical of the gay cleansing program as every other person in the world who possesses a functioning brain. More details here.
Bonus: Check out Haggard's awkward confrontation with biologist Richard Dawkins from Dawkins' excellent documentary The Root of All Evil?. It's dripping with disgust and condescension:
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Haggard Still a Homo
