New sex allegations against Ted Haggard

He's a hypocrite, I know. But as I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog, there is an element of tragedy in Ted Haggard's story. And now it keeps getting worse:

Disgraced evangelical leader Ted Haggard's former church disclosed Friday that the gay sex scandal that caused his downfall extends to a young male church volunteer who reported having a sexual relationship with Haggard — a revelation that comes as Haggard tries to repair his public image.

Brady Boyd, who succeeded Haggard as senior pastor of the 10,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, told The Associated Press that the man came forward to church officials in late 2006 shortly after a Denver male prostitute claimed to have had a three-year cash-for-sex relationship with Haggard.

Boyd said an "overwhelming pool of evidence" pointed to an "inappropriate, consensual sexual relationship" that "went on for a long period of time ... it wasn't a one-time act." Boyd said the man was in his early 20s at the time. He said he was certain the man was of legal age when it began.

Oh man. Haggard, you're gay. Live the life you want. Stop torturing yourself, dude. Here's Andrew Sullivan's reaction, btw. It's far more incisive than anything I came up with:

At some point, surely evangelical Christians will have to ask themselves: are we going to continue to demonize homosexuality to such an extent that even our ablest preachers and leaders are led into destructive, secret and often abusive relationships because we cannot allow them to pursue open and honest and loving ones?

The countless gay men who are currently running many of the world's leading Christian denominations are threats to themselves, to other gay men, to their wives and their churches because ancient doctrine forces them into twisted shells of human beings. In the Catholic church, this led to a horrifying epidemic of child abuse, protected and enabled by the last two Popes. And their response to this? To ratchet up the psychological pressure even further on the men whose psyches and souls they have already permanently warped.

When will this end?

Andrew Sullivan on Gaza

Andrew Sullivan has some interesting thoughts on Gaza, many of which I haven't considered:

And so you have an excruciating confluence of the questions of proportionality in a just war and asymmetry in the war against terrorism. What renders the current awfulness particularly wrenching is that the immoral means Hamas uses are logical from the point of view of an entity that is committed to Israel's destruction but not powerful enough to achieve it. And the response of Israel is logical from the point of view of a Western country enduring constant terrorist bombardment. Hence the never-ending argument in which both extremes reinforce themselves. This is not, one remembers, a Likud government. This is what the center left needs to do in Israel to stay in power at this point. And it has the backing of Egypt.

The nature of the conflict therefore ensures that Israel will kill and injure and traumatize far more human beings than Hamas can, even though Israel's intentions may be more honorable (and the relative lack of civilian deaths, given the pounding that has been going on in Gaza, is striking evidence for Israel's relative scrupulousness). This means that Israel will continue to lose the war of ideas and that Hamas will benefit from the impasse. Meanwhile, Jewish Israelis face a demographic reckoning and the forces of Jihadism gain a new recruiting tool. Abbas is temporarily weakened; and Iran's ideological strength temporarily waxes. Democracy, pace the neocons, is not a panacea: Hamas has more democratic legitimacy, it seems to me, than Mubarak.

A Center-Left President

Andrew Sullivan has a nice a little piece about Republicans are finally waking up to the Barack Obama most of us already know:

I'm as struck as Mark McKinnon by the sudden, if tempered, swooning of the center-right for Obama. even Fred Barnes has had an epiphany of sorts. They are responding to his obviously sensible and accomplished picks for the economy and foreign affairs as if they have realized for the first time who "that one" actually is. He is not now and never has been a leftist ideologue. That was a paranoid fantasy that helped kill the GOP this year. He is a pragmatic, sane, reasoned centrist liberal. He doesn't want to surrender to terror or abolish capitalism - he wants to hone our fight against the Islamists to better effect and to save capitalism from itself. And the core meaning of his candidacy - an end to the polarizing culture war battles of the post-Vietnam era - is not just hype. It's real.

Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State?

The big rumor out there is that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama met yesterday about the Secretary of State job. Andrew Sullivan thinks it's an inspired move:

It is a senior enough position not to be fobbed off; it really does take advantage of the Clinton name abroad; it could even put Bill to good use and keep him out of mischief; and Obama has kept telling us that his cabinet model is "Team Of Rivals." Giving Hillary that kind of position is straight out of Lincoln.

Unlike the vice-presidency, a secretary of state has real constitutionally-designated things to do. From Clinton's point of view, it would be a natural position from which to run to succeed Obama in 2016 (or to make an inside push to oust him in 2012). The emergence of Max Baucus as the front senator for healthcare seems to me a sign that Obama might have already been signaling this maneuver. If Clinton isn't the lead player on healthcare, what is she going to do?

So here's hoping he offers and she accepts. It's an elegant and shrewd move; both public spirited and yet coldly calculating at the same time. Pure Obama.

I mostly agree with Andrew. Obama seems to be following the Lincoln/Kennedy model for building a cabinet where a president puts the best minds possible in a room together and lets them argue it out. (This, of course, is the opposite of the George W. Bush cabinet.)

But I feel unease with putting a Clinton anywhere near the White House for the same reasons I never thought Hillary should be VP: Obama's campaign is about change, and putting a Clinton near the White House is the opposite of change. But in the end, Hillary is a great politician and would probably be a great asset to the Obama administration.