OMFG, how humilating.
Ted Haggard’s Daddy Dobson-approved Spiritual De-Gaying Oversight Squad has released a statement in light of the disgraced pastor, former male escort client and meth purchaser’s outrageous fundraising plea to the faithful to support the lifestyle to which he had been accustomed while heading up New Life Church. (Ted promised the suckers his followers that they would be “rewarded in heaven” for supporting him.)
Ted had planned to move into a Phoenix halfway house, the Dream Center, where he would “minister to men” there while working toward his degree in counseling, but alas, that invitation was just withdrawn.
The restoration team — godly, clean men who inserted themselves into the life of the fallen pastor, were not pleased. (Rocky Mountain News):
Dan Savage from Slog, whose reader Dave Coffman discovered Ted’s request for cash was to flow through a dissolved non-profit run by a convicted sex offender, said:“Mr. Haggard’s solicitation for personal support was inappropriate,” his church supervisors said in the statement. The statement came one day after the four-member team of ministers responsible for overseeing the spiritual restoration of Haggard met with him in Phoenix.
Last week, Haggard had e-mailed a KRDO-TV reporter in Colorado Springs, asking that supporters send contributions to Families with a Mission, a Monument non-profit run by Paul Huberty, a twice convicted sex offender.
…“It was never the intention of the Dream Center that Mr. Haggard would provide any counsel or other ministry…Mr. Haggard will not be moving in or working with the Dream Center. He will not be doing any ministry. He will be seeking secular employment to support himself.”
Oh, man. What a great day. I fucking live for the day when every asshole out there bilking gullible Christians out of their hard-earned dough — from the Nazi pope on down — is told the same damn thing: Get a fucking job, you parasite.
40 Responses to “Ted’s spiritual restoration team: get a job”
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but…but… he HAS secular employment.
he’s a con artist.
Hmm… men’s room attendant?
Ted’s future boss:
Anyone want to sit in the cubicle next to Haggard?
Takers?
Please?
Poor guy. I mean, really, what secular skills does he have? If he hasn’t been given the Disgraced Bushie Medal of Honor and shunted into a triple digit do-nothing job at a right-wing advocacy group by now, I’m afraid the Pastor is royally screwed.
Mildly OT: In Dan Savage’s column this week, a geeky teen girl writes in to say she is miserable with her breasts, wants her male peers to respect her and her interests, and Dan agrees she’s really transgender and should keep thinking of herself as a boy!
Here’s my email to Dan, I hope if enough people react the damage he did to this girl and god knows how many others like her may be undone.
“Dan, I’m sure your alert readers the world over will tell you, but you messed up, big time.
Let’s go over what Tomboy says:
“I’m a high-school girl.”
“I’ve worn boy clothes and had male friends, mainly because I’m into things like video games and geek stuff.”
“I’ve come to terms with the fact that my mentality doesn’t match up with my vagina.”
“But now most male clothes don’t fit and my male peers don’t take me seriously because of my body”
“I like boys.”
Tomboy is not a boy: she is a normal girl in the fucked up sexist society of high school, USA, where a normal girl can’t wear “boy clothes” (read normal, comfortable, no drama clothes) or play video games and like geek stuff (read “anything technology oriented, including computers, science and math”). Shit, except for the DD breasts, I used to be her!
Here is the dope: Tomboy is a normal geeky girl, with normal geeky interests and normal geeky friends (except that they seem to be too dorky even to deal with breasts on their geeky friend, they’ll grow out of that soon enough). She doesn’t need an online transgender community: she needs to graduate with the best grades she can and get into some nice geeky university, like MIT, where I graduated from a few years ago! By the time the geeky girls get to geek heaven (engineering university), they are so cool and so in demand they have no time left to wonder if they should really be girls or not. They are too busy having lots of boyfriends and job interviews with cool computer game companies.
Sign me: Another Tomboy”
Sales.
Consulting. Less competent ones are making money from the DoD now, don’t laugh.
Pharmaceutical Sales.
If this guy’s smart, he’ll whip out an autobiography (or hire a ghostwriter, if he can afford it), the more sordid the better. Then he’ll go on a big speaking tour to capitalize on the book.
Ted, bubbe, all you’ve got left is your shamelessness. Make it work for you.
He might be qualified for Guy at Old Country Buffet Who Checks the Temperature of the Meatballs Every 15 Minutes to Make Sure They Aren’t Too Hot.
Matt, yes, of hot balls he knows
I suddenly feel the need to link Ted Haggard Is Completely Heterosexual.
Cassie - I’d send you flowers if I could. That was a stand-up letter I’m saving if my girl is 14 and depressed about being a geek.
Off topic, more related to the quote: They’ll be “rewarded in heaven” for giving him cash? Is there some super-secret VIP room in heaven where you only get in if you’re rolling up on dubs installed by creepy grifters? I thought the whole point was “HEAVEN IS FUCKAWESOME AND YOU TOTALLY WANT TO GO.”
If it’s gonna be lame without the rewards promised me by some jerk on Earth, why even bother?
I’ll leave aside the obvious, obvious theological failure that is anything resembling a mortal’s promise of admittance to heaven without condition if certain acts are performed here on earth. This is the sort of shit angry Germans start peasants’ wars about.
I’d ghost-write the thing for free!
Cassie, you’re not reading that letter very carefully. The writer writes that “I like boys. I just wish I could be one of them, too. I’m too young for breast-reduction surgery or gender-reassignment counseling, but these are things I’m considering” and that she doesn’t identify as a female. She may not in fact be transgendered, but she is wondering if she is; most geek girls, and I was one, don’t wonder if they’re really boys and in the wrong body.
I think ol’ Ted should be given the “worst” job (as chosen by a panel of viewers- possibly that one where the lady gets bitten by snakes all the time) featured on Dirty Jobs. In fact, I think this should happen to every hypocritical assberet in the media.
Senator Craig, you get “Pig Inseminator!”
@ 5 - way to cherry-pick that letter and article.
@ 16 - right on Betsy D!
Read Dan’s excellent sex advice column at www.thestranger.com/savage.
And he said the young writer needs to be “getting adequate support for exploration of gender experience, identity, and expression. And third, having access to good, transgender-competent medical information and care.” That sounds like good advice for everyone. Dan and his experts never told this girl to go lopping her boobs off, they said she needed to find a competent, compassionate, transgender-friendly environment to explore her gender. Relax, Cassie.
RATS - the period at the end of the sentence got added into the URL I posted. Here’s the right link:
www.thestranger.com/savage
Speaking of hypocrites how about Barbara Lee and Ron Dellums supporting a Black Muslim cult AFTER their leader was exposed for raping multiple 12-14 year old girls. They went on to murder, torture, smash up Arab owned liquor stores among other things.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/08/BAT4RER742.DTL
It was the top local bay area story for about a week this month. Lee has apologized apparently.
Off topic? Perhaps.
Ted could always offer his persona as a cartoon character…oh wait…
Ted could always run for political office!
Defiantly lie through his teeth for all the publicity he can get, blaming everyone but himself, and run for Congress!!
Whoops, wrong guy…
Go on TV and gab with Tucker??
Yeah, about that “reward in heaven” deal. Wasn’t one of the many issues which started the Catholic/Protestant split called…hmm, yeah, I think the word we learned was ‘indulgences.’
Tasty, tasty indulgences.
On a more serious note. “Ex-gay” ministries do not change sexual orientations. I’ve talked to people who used to be in them and have found out that very few people stay very long and the leaders privately admit to still having same sex desires.
Also, the founders of the infamous Exodus Ministries fell in love, left the ministries, and had a commitment ceremony. The Christian Taliban has been trying to spin that away for years.
So, he wants to raise money from gullible Christians and work in a secular, predominantly male environment.
Two words: Senator Haggard. What godless liberals like Ted Kennedy need is guidance!
Yeah, about that “reward in heaven” deal. Wasn’t one of the many issues which started the Catholic/Protestant split called…hmm, yeah, I think the word we learned was ‘indulgences.’
Tasty, tasty indulgences.
Actually, indulgences were more of a “get out of hell free card”: drop a few coin into the Friar’s hand, and you can shave years off your Purgatory sentence. (This was before the Protestants came along and suggested that maybe people might actually get into heaven without being perfect somehow.)
Maybe Ted could get a job as a tour guide at the Creation Museum.
I wonder if anyone actually was gullible to send him any money.
I would certainly hope that the only people sending him money were GOP donors.
he could always sign up to be the men’s bathroom cop at the Minneapolis airport.
to StotheL and BetsyD:
Maybe she is transgender, but the possibility that she is not was never mentioned by D. Savage or his expert.
Show me an awkward teen-ager who DOES like her body and breasts: it’s not so strange to prefer to be a boy! They’re the norm, after all, right? Heck, I’m still not comfortable with my breasts, and they’re run of the mill B cup, and I am definitely an average straight woman (now in my 30s).
The part of her letter that really struck alarm bells for me was the part of not having the same mentality as her vagina. Why can’t a vagina go along with a mentality which prefers to wear boys clothes and be geeky and like video games? It’s much more likely that her problem is not with her vagina or her mentality, but with a society that tells her that one cannot go with the other.
Cassie- change engineering to geology, and that’s me!
Cassie,
I don’t know anything about the organization that Dan Savage referred her to, but isn’t it reasonable to expect that and organization that supports people with counseling and support for exploring gender issues might consider the possibility that she isn’t transgendered? Or provide some great support on how to own her birth gender but be okay being non-stereotypical if that is her case?
In her letter she was quite clear that she considered herself to be so. All the indications were that the people around her, Dan, and the referral organization were in agreement that it was far too soon to do anything surgical or irreversible.
Her whole world is going to tell her “you’re just a tomboy, you’re a geek, but you’re really a girl, and you’ll grow out of this boy thing” — there is no possibility she will not get that message and hear it as an option. If she herself is so clear on her own gender, shouldn’t she have the opportunity to hear voices that acknowledge the possibility she is right?
I know you are projecting your own situation onto her letter, and so am I. The projection I put on it is hearing you telling all the people in my life as a gay teen going through hell to tell me that I wasn’t gay, just artistic and intellectual, and that it would be utterly wrong to tell me that actually being gay was a possibility I should be supported in exploring.
And that would have been deeply wrong, even coming from some straight man who had been an artistic and somewhat effeminate boy who “grew out of it” in college.
Her world is full of people telling her to ignore her own reality and embrace theirs. I hear you adding another voice to the crowd telling her she cannot trust herself, and I think that is a disservice. Your letter to Dan Savage gives her no more room for her own truth than the voices of the patriarchy do - it is just a truth you prefer to have imposed on her over theirs. Is that really what you meant?
Shouldn’t you instead be cheering on the people who are giving her options?
Peter,
I think you might well be right. I am not against her seeking advice from the transgender community. What I object to is that in Dan’s response, there was no mention of “you might be a normal female in a f*ed up society”, and I’m sorry, but telling someone it’s too early for a boob job is not the same as telling them that there might be no need for the boob job if the problem is in the eye of the onlookers rather than the one with the boobs!
To compare the situation with that of a gay person coming out: you knew you were attracted to other boys. Other people tried to confuse you, but you had internal unity.
This girl feels that her intellectual interests and behavior are incompatible with a vagina. That’s a big distinction, and it doesn’t scream transgender to me. If she said: “I feel like a boy, I hate my female body” that would be WAY different. What she is saying is: “my female body gets in the way of my relation with my friends and my ability to pursue the activities I enjoy. I wish it would go away.” She doesn’t hate her body: she hates the social consequences of her body. Big, big distinction. At least to me.
Again, I am not saying she is not transgender, that’s for her to figure out, and I’m glad we live in a society that’s making some strides in accepting that. But in this case, it sounds much more like plain old sexism making one teen girl miserable with herself.
How to get a Republican Horny:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/timtimes/1277152453/
Worksafe and totally hilarious.
Enjoy.
Cassie, there’s something I wonder if you are overlooking.
This isn’t really some random youngster. If someone told me exactly the same story you did about a teeneager in, say, their little sister’s high school class, I would be somewhat more sympathetic to your point. Statistically, it is far more likely that any given geeky teenager is straight than gay, and even more statistically likely that they are not transgendered.
Even then, I would be sympathetic pretty much only to the idea of making sure that the teen was supported in being non-standard, and wasn’t only being given the option of being a Barbie clone or a transgendered person. And even then, it would be dependent on my knowing more about the family and how rigidly they perpetuated other sorts of stereotypes.
I still wouldn’t declare that it was wrong to tell her she might be right in her own interpretation of her gender, that should shouldn’t get any support to help her sort it out, and that going to an expensive school and dating geeky guys would automatically get her past it all.
But on top of all those considerations, this is is a teen who has sought support from a nationally known expert and advocate on, let’s say, non-standard sexuality. Those statistical percentages shoot right out the window. The question shifts from “What are the chances that some kid in my sister’s class is transgendered” to “What are the chances that someone writing to Dan Savage is transgendered?”
It doesn’t, of course mean that she automatically is or isn’t anything, but it sure raises the percentages.
I’m somewhat reminded of all the people who, having been told that I am a gay man who was raised Catholic, took the faith very seriously, and after decades of struggle finally left the church because I found it incompatible with my own faith and personal reality, responded with “Have you read Leviticus?”
I find it pretty inconcievable that a young person who describes a lifetime of hanging out with the boys, a boyish personal presentation, a self identity as male, and a supportive family and friends has never been presented with the idea that it’s okay to be a tomboy. I bet Dan Savage did, too, and gave her the credit for being at least that aware of the world around her, and therefore, gave her the part of her answer that she specifically asked him for, trusting her to work out for herself, once she had access to the support and information, whether it actually applied to her.
In short, he treated her like a real person, with a brain and a genuine question, one whose experience and identity actually matters.
I think he did exactly the right thing.
If it turns out that she isn’t transgendered, it seems to me that the most likely consequence is that she will figure that out and become comfortable with who she is, but in the meantime have gotten to know some pretty amazing non-standard people, and end up living in a bigger wider world as a result.
My last post felt more lecturing than I meant it to. Sorry. I wish I had had access to things like Dan Savage’s column and the Internet when I was going through my “who I am doesn’t match what people think I ought to be” times.
Cassie, I know your motives were positive. And I hope that all the geeky tomboys and artsy boys, gay, straight, transgendered or not, have people who care enough to get angry when the think they aren’t hearing other possible options. Thanks for caring.
I kinda fall halfway between Peter and Cassie — I think we need to know a lot more about what’s going on in this girl’s life so we can determine if the problem is that she’s transgender or if the problem is that the guys that she thought were her friends have started backing her into corners and groping her. As an early bloomer (I was a C-cup by high school and am now a D-cup), I can relate to the feelings of not wanting to be female just so guys would stop being such assholes.
Ahem.
Justice would have him out there selling his ass to feed that family of his.
Sorry, but someone had to say it.