Gayle Haggard and her Bisexual Man

Someone please pass me a smelling salt. Gayle Haggard claims that her husband, Ted, has undergone counseling and is "free of gay urges”. Yea, okay, whatever. How about this for a headline: "Gayle Haggard stands by her bisexual man". Now that is something I could respect.

Haggard was accused of purchasing sexual services and methamphetamines from a homosexual prostitute named Mike Jones three years ago. At the same time, he was preaching against homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Jones’ forced Haggard “out of the closet” because he was angry that he was hiding his sexual activities and preaching against them at the same time.

We all know that any kind of addiction whether it be smoking, gambling, alcohol or sexual is possible to recover from. To say that the urges are gone is ridiculous. Anyone with an addiction knows that those urges never go away. They are a constant thorn in the side. They are not “cured” from those addictions. They choose not to submit to them.

The only reason the Haggard’s are claiming they his is cured is that they are looking for new ways to cash in on the hype and to promote Gayle’s book. The bottom line is that Ted Haggard doesn’t have just “gay urges”. He is most likely bisexual in his sexual orientation. Gayle shared that Ted had told her early in their marriage about his relations with another man and she states, “Through the years, what I’ve discovered is that it would reemerge in Ted’s life from time to time, but he didn’t tell me about it,” Gayle said. “When I would ask him, he would say it was no longer a problem, since it was something he was ashamed of and trying to hide.”

The Haggard’s choose to live their lives in the public sphere. They ran the New Life Church that grew to over 14,000 members and Ted Haggard was the president of the National Association of Evangelicals. The outing of his gay “urges” turned their lives upside down. His indiscretions hit every national paper and he was asked to leave his job.

I don’t really care whether Ted Haggard is bisexual, or that he is embarrassed and chooses to sleep with his wife only. I don’t even give a rip whether Gayle Haggard stands by her man. More power to them. What annoys me is another round of religious zealots profiting off the rest of us and claiming information that is untrue and insulting to others. Just say that he has gone through therapy and is learning to fight his sexual nature. Let her market her book (because I do understand that they need money and his chances of getting a big church again is probably null) on the choices she is making to keep her family together.

It’s not that I have a problem with Gayle Haggard's book or that she has chosen to stay with her husband. What I have a problem with is the way she is going about it and stating that he is free from these sexual urges. And their use of religion when it comes to social expectations, gender status and sexual orientation and self-promotion. I guess the joke is on us. We allow these idiots to run our spiritual and social lives and this is the result of our bad decisions. They use God as their meal ticket. Obviously, they did not learn the consequences on the first go around.