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My father, who was born and raised in the Bible Belt, used to comment that he knew Baptists for whom staggering sobbing down the church aisle and getting “saved” was the highlight of their week. Some individuals did it at least fifty-two times a year.
I think of that every time I hear about the Ted Haggard scandal. To those of you who have been living in a wicker basket down in the basement and being fed through the slats for the past week or two, Ted Haggard is a prominent Evangelist recently revealed to have purchased methamphetamine and had sex with a male prostitute. Are you as amazed as I am?
Past “stunning” revelations about the sexual misconduct of the likes of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, have left me old and jaded and singing Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” under my breath after checking out the morning news on my favorite blogs. Sex scandals are all gas and noise and melodrama. I think it’s likely that the impact on Haggard’s professional and personal life has been devastating, (and I very much hope that he’s telling the truth about only buying meth once. That stuff is nasty and does bad things to the people who use it.) but whatever noise it’s made in the evangelical community will abruptly vanish into silence as most popped balloons do.
These people in the Religious Right are not political naifs, no matter how fervently both liberals and neo-cons may cherish that notion. They care about power – not moral consistency. Their players are as canny and cynical about human frailty as their secular counterparts, and discovering that one of their own has been paying for gay sex while inveighing against the dangers of homosexuality is not going to cause any deep psychic rifts in any of them. It’s merely infuriating stupidity on the part of someone who should have known better than to get caught. Haggard may not be a mover and shaker anymore, but he’ll stagger down that aisle, get saved again, be welcomed back into the congregation, and someone else will take his place behind the pulpit saying exactly the same things he did.
What the Haggard scandal does do is provide an amped up example of the double dealing that has become an increasing hallmark of the right wing, something that goes beyond the garden variety of the public figure who keeps a mistress (or a boyfriend) on the side while making campaign commercials with his wife and his kids and his Golden Retriever. It’s one thing for a politician to dole out the usual PR crap about his all-American family life. It’s an entirely different matter for someone to make, say, the glories of monogamous heterosexuality a political issue while seeing a male prostitute on the side.
That kind of hypocrisy is, of course, practically a cliché when it comes to sexual misconduct. What’s more disturbing is when it extends to other issues, many of which strike at the very heart of what makes America America. The right wing denounces Saddam Hussein as a vile torturer even as it attempts to legalize torture. The right wing cites Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait as an example of Hussein’s expansionist ambitions even after we’ve invaded a country that posed no threat to us. The right wing boasts of spreading Democracy throughout the Middle East even as it attempts to suppress the vote here. Pay a visit to right-wing websites like Free Republic or Little Green Footballs and marvel at the same people who laud Ann Coulter and post Rachel Corrie jokes opining about the “unreasoning hatred” of liberals.
Much has been made recently about that other “stunning” revelation by David Kuo that members of Bush’s administration hold the Religious Right in contempt. Quite aside from the fact that the leaders of the Religious Right had probably already figured this out -- using big city sharpies by pretending to be a slack jawed yokel is an old, consistently successful southern trick – this does little more than distract people from a very dangerous similarity between the Religious Right and the Neo-Cons. Both of them despise the masses, see them as children, sheep, a “bewildered herd” that must, for its own good, be driven rather than reasoned with. The political evangelicals see their mission as the tender shepherding of a flock that must be protected from too much “head knowledge,” the neo-cons see it as a realistic strategy of an intellectual elite.
Thus, they all lie to the public about issues like torture and the constitution, saying one thing as they do another, as casually as some grownups lie to children about Santa Claus, and using much the same rationale. To them The Bill of Rights, checks and balances and the Geneva Conventions are amiable fictions to be invoked only when convenient, and anyone who shows signs of taking them seriously is treated with the scathing contempt reserved for adults who still believe in the Easter Bunny.
Haggard’s lies are penny ante. Their exposure is not going to set the country afire or significantly alter the agenda of the Religious Right. His lies, you see, were not about something his followers wanted to be lied to about. They didn’t want to just feign a belief in Haggard as an upstanding family man.
The bigger lies being told by both the religious and the secular right, the ones about the abuse of detainees, the reductions of civil liberties, the dangerous expansion of the Executive Branch, are different in that they are lies that many, many Americans are perfectly content to pretend to believe. And that’s what makes those other lies much, much more dangerous.
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