Completely Heterosexual

Speaking of tragic stories, Ted Haggard is cured! Hooray!

One of four ministers who oversaw three weeks of intensive counseling for the Rev. Ted Haggard said the disgraced minister emerged convinced that he is "completely heterosexual."

Haggard also said his sexual contact with men was limited to the former male prostitute who came forward with sexual allegations, the Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur told The Denver Post for a story in Tuesday's edition.

"He is completely heterosexual," Ralph said. "That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing."

Not a constant thing?

So, after a series of role-playing games (and don't you just shudder to imagine what that must have consisted of?) three weeks of counseling, Haggard says he never was really attracted to men, after all. He was just "acting out."

Didn't these "counselors" notice the inconsistency between that statement and the one he sent to his congregation just three months ago?

[Rev. Larry Stockstill] read a two-page letter from Haggard, who has left town with his family to escape the media glare and work on family issues, church officials said.

Describing a lifelong battle against temptations contrary to his teachings, Haggard wrote that he had sought assistance "in a variety of ways." While he experienced stretches of "freedom," he wrote, "the dirt that I thought was gone would resurface."

"There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life," Haggard wrote.

So, was Haggard lying then, or is he lying now? "All of my adult life" sounds like a fairly constant thing to me.

Even if you believe that homosexuality is something that can be removed by prayer, as the men counseling Ted Haggard surely do, it is foolish in the extreme to pretend that after three weeks of role-playing therapy "intensive therapy" (whatever that consisted of), the man is "cured." Haggard, his wife and children, and the flock he used to lead deserve more honesty than that, even if they don't want to face it.