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TELEVANGELISTS should thank the devil

Thursday, November 23 2006 @ 11:11 PM CST

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Robert Seltzer

Haggard follows script for straying televangelists

Without the devil - and the sin he inspires - the preachers would be collecting unemployment checks.

Think about it: You cannot save a flock that needs no saving, and you cannot pass the collection basket for a cause that needs no funding.


You want money to fight the devil?

What devil?

So when televangelists condemn evil, they should also embrace it - if only metaphorically - because without it, their salaries would be one pay grade below vagrant.

But if the preachers get too close to evil, if they taste what they should be condemning, watch out, because they will get singed by the very fire that ignites their righteousness.

Just ask the Rev. Ted Haggard, who resigned as pastor of the New Life Church following allegations that he paid a man for sex during the past three years.

No one can apologize like a televangelist, no one; the master finger-pointers, already roaring down the freeway of intolerance, launch into hyper-drive when they point their fingers at themselves.

Haggard was no exception, his self-loathing so painful that it made Richard Nixon look like a slacker.

"The fact is I am guilty of sexual immorality," he said in a letter read to the congregation of the church in Colorado Springs, Colo., according to the Associated Press.
Haggard did not attend the service.

"And I take responsibility for the entire problem," the statement read. "I am a deceiver and a liar. There's a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life."

We are all sinners, but most of us confine our catalogue of transgressions to dark confessional booths. Not so the televangelists. They flagellate themselves in public, their eyes tearing, their faces quivering a la Jimmy Swaggart, who begged forgiveness for cavorting with prostitutes in 1988.



"I have sinned against you, my Lord," he said before his congregation in New Orleans.

If the preachers are obsessed with apologies, however, we should keep those apologies in perspective. Haggard apologized for his "sexual immorality." Swaggart might as well have apologized for being a heterosexual.

Haggard committed a transgression, all right. He betrayed his wife and children, regardless of whether the "sexual immorality" involved a man or a woman. And there was another transgression - his hostility for gays who, unlike the ex-president of the National Association of Evangelicals, do not revel in the self-loathing that makes him such a sad and hypocritical figure.

When the New Jersey Supreme Court recognized the right to same-sex unions recently, Republican strategists gloried in the ammunition it provided them. There go those activist courts again, they thought, upholding the rights of human beings to be, well, human beings. Even the president, who once seemed loathe to enter the muck of homophobia, got into the act.

The spin in the Haggard controversy is alarming. If homosexual activity is bad, is it worse than betraying your family? Is it worse than condemning people for activities in which you yourself engage?

Sins are not determined by political agendas. They are determined by a higher source. Did Haggard - and perhaps some of his followers - forget that? Sadly, the answer seems yes.

rseltzer@express-news.net

Robert Seltzer is a columnist with the San Antonio Express-News.

http://www.whittierdailynews.com

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