Everybody has been following the hypocrisy of Ted Haggard and his wretched followers, but few have actually been putting this scandal in any sort of real perspective. Let us ask ourselves, would Ted Haggard have married a woman and had children if he had been allowed the prospect of being a respected part of the community as a person in a same sex marriage? Would Mike have turned Ted in as being a married homosexual then? There is a huge community of closeted gay men in marriages to straight women out there now, and religous hypocrisy is a great part of the reason for that. The fundamentalists say they oppose homosexuality, but actually, they just drive it underground. Who really suffers most? It is the children of these often, sordid, deceitful, and superficial matches.

We need to stop bashing openly gay men and women. They deserve the same rights and privileges that heterosexual men and women receive. Respect them for having the courage to confront a hostile world with openess and honesty. But what about those of the homosexual community that try to play it both ways? They often resort to deceit and hurt those who become intimate and close to them. They are encouraged by the heterosexual others in their liives, to be deceitful to both themselves and to their significant others in relationships. Usually the motivation is their own conservative religious beliefs, and also because of the negative encouragement and pressures of their shamed, heterosexual, religious relatives who often try to hide reality away.

I have known and been friends with several gay married men in my lifetime. And I have seen the destructiveness to themselves and others, as they have tried to play it straight. Gay men want family, even as they desire sex with the same sex. Allowing legal same sex marriage is one way for mainstream society to say to homosexuals that it is possible for all to have families that love them, and that they should be accepted by their biological families as well. It might help put an end to shunning some of our society who have been made most vulnerable to abuse.

Strikingly, nobody has much mentioned the family of Ted Haggard. How much did the wife know of his sexuality? And how much did the children know? The paper had pictures of the fundamentalist congregation carting into their church box after box of tissue papers to cry with. How preposterous and superficial these crippled people are. It is the children that need these tissues, if there is something much to cry about? The congregation should simply go to Hell, and start to put a stop all their self-absorbed shame. The real shame they have is actually to have their religous hypocrisy now so exposed to view. But they seem determined to continue on as before and we should have little compassion for such.

Those who need the most counselling are the children of Ted Haggard. In a way, they have been emotionally abused by his pretense and dishonesty. Here is a great site to help them, and other children of gay homosexuals, examine and understand some of what has happened to them through the actions of their mothers and dads. Though it is written primarily for married homosexuals and their spouses, certainly this is also a much better resource for the children involved in these matrimonies than all the Dr. Dobsons and like clones will be providing.