To the editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette:
Following revelations of Pastor Ted Haggards sexual immorality with a gay male escort, the disgraced clergyman is being subjected to an ordeal more akin to witch-doctoring than healing. The details of the brutal process of restoration he will endure expose the reality of so-called transformational ministry, the technique the religious right uses to cure homosexuals now that pseudo-scientific reparative therapy has been discredited. The restoration will take 3-5 years and is centered on verbal abuse, shaming, and self-abasementeverything it would seem up to wailing, gnashing of teeth, and wearing sackcloth and ashes. As H.B. London of Focus on the Family describes it, the process involves godly counsel, when godly men who are clean themselves insert themselves in the life of the one who is struggling. Only 50% of participants, all of whom would have to be highly motivated to attempt the impossible, manage to stick with the rigorous program of restoration. London says those who fail wind up miserable and angry, selling cars or shoes occupations he clearly does not admire. Of course the voodoo practitioners who perform restorations wont admit that broken lives result from internalized homophobia and the browbeating and trauma they themselves inflict on their unfortunate victims.
Those who would turn gays into straights have gone from playing doctors to playing God. There is no scriptural warrant for their barbaric rituals: Christ may have cast out demons, but He never claimed to turn a persons sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual. It would seem that the copy of the Bible in use by Focus on the Family omits the parts where Christ teaches that love is the highest law, and where He confronts not the adulteress He rescues from being stoned, but the spiteful stone-throwers who were themselves tainted by sin. Clearly men like the overseers of Pastor Ted think they have a monopoly on godliness, just like the Pharisees of the New Testament who went around passing judgment on others for falling short of religious codes of behavior. Christ chose to confront the Pharisees, not their victims or contrite sinners as Pastor Ted appears to consider himself.
If nothing else, the degradation of Pastor Ted Haggard by restoration reveals the ugly truth about the love that fundamentalists offer to unhappy homosexuals who look to them in hopes of changing. These primitive rites of exorcism, aimed not at any demons or disease but at an immutable nature that comes from God Himself, stem from a malevolent superstition that continues to destroy lives. That cannot be what Christ meant when He said we must love one another.
Don Gorton, Esq.
Chair, The Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project
Sam Harris here, as well as here, is a great place to start with this sort of stuff. Of course what you describe is barbaric. There’s a long tradition of barbarity in the vast majority of the world’s faiths to tide us over until the next millennium.
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No amount of reason is going to prevail in the presence of such superstitious religiosity. Whatever happens to Ted Haggard is the result of his own choices. Our only hope is that reasonable people will see through this exploitative sham and emerge stronger in their convictions than before. Otherwise, it’s merely a footnote to a tawdry tale that elicits a “hmmm” and nothing else. Arguing matters of “faith” is a waste of time.