Dear Editor,
It’s as if I am ‘touched’ with the gift of prophecy.
Just last November I wrote of gay pastor Ted Haggard: “This is not the end of this story – watch for the pastor being ‘forgiven’ and ‘cured’; seems that for his God all things are possible, except perhaps committed gay couples loving each other. That is impossible for this God of all possibilities.”
Alleluia! Now, one of four evangelical ministers who oversaw a mere three weeks of counselling for Rev Ted is saying that the pastor is now “completely heterosexual” – another of those evangelical miracle cures we so often hear about, I’m sure.
Still, one wonders how much the Christian church stands by Rev Ted’s religious cure. Church leaders “strongly urged Haggard to go into secular work instead of the Christian ministry.” God, it seems suddenly has no need for Rev Ted, the former leader of 14,000 strong church and president of the National Association of Evangelicals (USA). “He is completely heterosexual,” one church elder said. “That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn’t a constant thing.” And therein lies the faulty perception of the Christian church in regards to homosexuality.
Haggard says the only same-sex encounter he has ever had was with the former male prostitute Mike Jones, giving support to the evangelical belief that homosexuality is simply “acting-out”; a mere behavioural anomaly that can be corrected. Such opinions, of course, run contrary to growing scientific evidence and psychological analysis which hold that homosexuality is in fact an identity and not simply a behaviour.
Yours faithfully,
Justin de Freitas
