An outspoken opponent of legal gay relationships, the Reverend Ted Haggard, a 50-year-old married father of five and president of the US National Association of Evangelicals, may have bought drugs and sex from a male prostitute. This has shocked the faithful and delighted the many who despise hypocrisy.
Somehow the unveiling of the weird embryonic dark soul of the Republican religious right always ends up in some gay place. Maybe it belongs there. The G.O.P. has made private sexual behavior part of its political platform. It wants to outlaw abortion, make stem cell research illegal, forbid counseling of women about reproductive choices, and draw up a constitutional amendment proclaiming that marriage may only be defined as a union between a man and a woman.
The party of life, pro-life that is, also began a war that has so far claimed 3,000 American lives and over a half a million Iraqis. It has spent or will spend perhaps $3 trillion dollars in the most badly conceived misadventure in American foreign policy history. Domestically, 46 million Americans lack health insurance, and as the city of New Orleans demonstrated after its catastrophic hurricane, homeland security doesn’t really work. The US is now the most feared, not respected nation on Earth, and any American who travels overseas has to spend half his time explaining that he isn’t like his fellow citizens who voted for George Bush. Americans have listened to five years of fear baiting about foreign terrorists from an illiterate Texan who never visited any foreign country, other than Mexico, before he assumed the Presidency in 2001.
Next Tuesday, the Republicans deserve to lose big. But up to the very minute the polling booths close, we will hear how the big bad gay terrorists are lining up to take over the halls of Congress unless the good Christian souls of America stop them.
Here in Van Nuys 