This was linked yesterday. He has yet to admit publicly to gay sex or drug use. He refers to his lies as “inconsistent remarks.”
Bah.
It’s hard for me to laugh at this kind of scandal. Both this one and the Foley one seem very tragic to me. Not because I think they are good people who have had bad things happen to them. It’s because I really think that what we are seeing is not so much hypocrisy as much as it is self-hatred in its most toxic form.
At the risk of coming across as self-righteous, I’m surprised that a lot of gay people don’t seem to talk much about this angle of the story. While I understand why it’s heart-warming to see someone like that get their comeuppance, I would think the schadenfreude would be a bit tempered by the understanding of where this apparent hypocrisy is coming from. It’s not because Haggard and others are evil people, IMO. It’s because the world in which they inhabit prohibits them from being who they are unrepentantly. In a way, they are just as much victims of the same machine that treats gays like freaks and undesirables. That they have helped maintain that machine through their actions is a consequence of their self-loathing and fear.
Perhaps they can be faulted for being weaker than all the other gay people who have been able to be true themselves or at least stay in the closet without throwing anyone else under the bus. But as someone who thinks the bigger problem is the social influences that allow this thing to happen, I have a hard time reveling in this. Optimistically I hope that scandals like this show the American people how damaging the stigma against homosexuality can be and perhaps it’ll move some people to change. But the pessimist in me fears that scandals like this only feed into ideas that homosexuals are deviant and nasty pervos.
How smart do you think they appear?
Salient point.
By that I meant that they must have convinced several, if not many, people of their intelligence and leadership qualities–unless they are royalty, and then they just have to be born…(not that Charles et al is anything like the people we are talking about here–then again, the man did say he wanted to be a tampon!)
An idea the evil lying scumbag/nut job is still propagating in his ‘apology’. So no - I don’t have even the beginning of a sliver of sympathy of any sort for the bastard, however much ‘suffering’ he’s going through it is entirely self-inflicted.
But get back to me when he appeals to the 23 million other scumbag fantasist followers to have a change of heart.
I’ve been uncomfortable myself with stories of vigilant gay activists who surveil homophobic politicians suspected of being gay, with the intent of gathering sufficient evidence to out them. This always struck me as weilding a two-edged sword, which, on the one hand, gives the hypocrite his comeuppance, but on the other, weilds the very root of the homophobe’s succes, the societal hatred toward gays, as a weapon of pure revenge.
My qualms are relieved quite a bit for the ones who pretty much out themselves through their own arrogance and/or stupidity. It’s much less of an ethical dilemma when, instead of tapping one’s calls to a prostitute for gay sex, the prostitute himself is the voluntary source. That’s just the hypocrite inadvertently getting his hand caught in the cookie jar, not the result of having a security camera pointed at the jar 24/7, just waiting to nail some self-hating gay pol.
You know what? I think you hit on the one thing that bugs me about this. This scandal hasn’t destroyed Haggard because he’s been outed as a hypocrite. Even Haggard knew he still had a chance of retaining his credibility if he only owned up to meth accusation. That’s because his flock can accept a drug abuser. That type of sin is downright vanilla compared to homosexuality. That’s the curse of death.
This scandal only has the sting that it does because he’s gay. Really he’s as much of hypocrite when it comes to drug use and infidelity, and yet the gay aspect is given more attention. The “just dessert” component to this would be lacking if it weren’t for society’s disdain for gays. Knowing that this scandal may not have received half of the attention if his only offenses had been drug use and marital unfaithfulness (which are the only two real offenses), I think that’s why its hard for me to celebrate his demise.
Is being born again and turning your life over to jesus a one time thing? Is it like confession where you obtain a clean slate to start over? Can he oops my bad. Then turn his life over to jesus again.
ps Loopydude .It is not about the cops .Its about the crime.
Well, he’s as much a part of the problem as a victim of it. More so, really, IMO. If he hoists himself, his problem. If I use his weapon of hate against him when I abhor it, now it’s my problem too. Sure it’s terrible there’s homophobia in the world, and I wouldn’t go out of my way to rub someone’s nose in it just because it hurts. But I don’t see much to lament in Haggard’s self-destruction. He made his dirty bed, and did as much as he could to fill it with his own filth. I wouldn’t throw him in, but if he falls in on his own, too fucking bad for him.
Here’s how I see it:
That people are raised in a way that causes them to loathe something that’s an essential part of who and what they are, that’s evil. And the victims of this evil system have my deepest sympathy. It can be hard to free oneself from the self-loathing one has internalized when young.
But here’s the deal: part of becoming an adult is taking responsibility for one’s choices. Your inner relationships amongst the shards of your divided self are your own karma. But once you, as a grown person, take your self-loathing, and deal with it by turning around and victimizing others, you are taking it beyond mere self-loathing.
Analogously, we know that many (most?) persons who abuse their spouses and children were abused themselves as children. We do not sympathize with such abusers. Even if they were abused as children, they are adults now, and we give them no free pass for the toxic emotions they were taught when young.
Neither should we in the case of self-denying gays who deal with their self-loathing by lashing out at other gay people. I can’t see a bit of difference, from a moral standpoint.
50 years ago New York schools, at least, didn’t force people into right handedness. I naturally write right-handed, but I bat and golf left-handed, and I’m better doing things left handed than most. So she could be a mix like me.
New York schools, no. New York teachers, yes. Not all of them, but a sizable percentage, judging from the anecdotal evidence I’ve gotten over the years, from teachers and ex-students.
That makes sense. Granted, the analogy is off because abusing children is wrong and criminal, while gay sex is not. But I understand the essence of what you’re saying.
A QUIZ!: Are You Left-handed?
How do we know he’s gay? A lot of these guys aren’t gay, they are just so compulsive they’ll put their dick in anything and everything they can.
I for one am glad that some gay people are starting to fight back against these monsters who try to treat them as sub-human, and try to write their sub-human status into the constitution. These assholes are actively doing harm to gay people and they deserve what they get.
Well, if you are going to discount the same sex aspect I admit it is harder to make the charge of gayness stick. However, if all he wanted was to get laid, why pay some guy $200 dollars a pop for three years? Why not get laid by a female prostitute and save a little cash, and a lot of potential trouble? Why be on an anti-gay soapbox and risk it all by, you know, fucking guys?
Because he can’t control his impulses.
How do you know he didn’t?
Wow, that was some horrible coding. Hopefully a mod will fix it???
If he has an uncontrollable impulse to fuck guys, I’d say that puts him smack dab in the middle of the homosexual demographic. If you a different definition, I am all ears.
Nice selective quoting. To answer your question, there are untold thousands of things that I don’t know about him, and whether he availed himself of the services of a female prostitute is one of them. My point, which you seem to have missed, is that the risk to his very way of life is much greater if he satisfies these urges with a guy. If a woman could satisfy these urges as well, why take the risk?
And while we are at it, how about a cite for this –
You might want to start by defining your terms. Who are “these guys,” exactly?