HiddenMysteries: Shelving Ted Haggard's marital advice

BY JENNIFER HUNTER

I was rifling through the bookshelves at the office recently and came across a tiny treasure.

My find came a couple of days after the scandal broke about evangelical minister Ted Haggard, former head of New Life Church -- the minister from Colorado Springs, Colo., who was involved with a male prostitute and the putative delights of crystal meth. I found his latest book, published this year in tandem with his wife, Gayle.

The subject -- guess what! -- is marriage: From This Day Forward, Making Your Vows Count a Lifetime. Can you believe it? Well, I couldn't and had to gobble up every blessed word.
Here was a holier-than-thou Christian leader, head of the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals, who consulted regularly with President Bush, who vehemently opposed gay marriage and who may have, after all, been schtupping a guy named Mike Jones once a month for the past three years. Oy vey. Poor Mrs. Haggard. Shades of Jimmy Swaggart and Tammy Faye.

I read on:

"When a wife is joined to her husband, she takes on his name, and that joining together directs the decisions that shape her life. She takes on his likeness and calling. She loves spending time with him, pleasing him, being in his presence. She longs for him, just as the church longs for Christ." Are we back in biblical times here? Abraham and Sarah? Or prelapsarian Eden, playing catch with an apple?

Maybe this stuff about taking on likeness and calling couldn't ultimately work for the Haggards because Ted decided after Gayle took his name that he really wanted Mike. Or maybe Gayle is a closet women's libber unable to go the whole nine Christian yards.

There is a word of caution here, women. Even the most liberated of men -- when you scratch the surface -- would really like you to spend every single minute of your waking time pleasing him or, as the Haggards put it, "serving him." So don't show this column to your significant other. It may give him skewed ideas.

Here's another excerpt Ted should have thought twice about before publishing: "Sex between a husband and wife is a singularly divine act. Nothing compares to it in terms of intimacy or significance. Animals mate randomly, and, well, so do some humans, to their own ruin." To their own ruin, Ted. Actually, you won't be ruined, I promise. You lost your job, that's true, and it hurts, but being gay doesn't mean being ruined. You need to embrace your inner self, Ted. As you noted in a message to your congregants: "There's part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all my adult life."

But you're not repulsive and dark, Ted; you're just a hypocrite. That's what you need to war against. Again, it's Gayle -- who seems like a lovely woman, a mother of five -- who deserves our real sympathy. She is the classic case of a woman who finds out her husband is cheating -- with a man. It happens more than you think, this Down Low stuff. Honesty is the best policy, especially for a Bible thumper. Right, Ted?

I phoned the publisher of the Haggard's book, WaterBrook Press, to find out what was going to happen to the book. I was told that 15,000 copies of From This Day Forward were published and 7,500 were sold or are in bookstores.

Are they going to recall the book? "No," said the very nice man on the phone, Joel Kneedler, the publishing house spokesman. Is the publisher embarrassed?

"I wouldn't call it 'embarrassed,' " Kneedler said. "The things they [the Haggards] say about the wedding ceremony are certainly true. Ted just may not have lived up to some of that." Kneedler, who belongs to Haggard's church in Colorado Springs, says the 14,000 members are praying for him.

Gayle will certainly need every kind thought they have.

Here is a last word from the Haggards for us to consider: "Your destiny is determined by the choices that you make every day."

Amen.

http://www.suntimes.com/

Shelving Ted Haggard's marital advice

Thursday, November 23 2006 @ 09:59 PM CST