The Politics of Outing Evangelicals

Turns out Ted Haggard is gay, or at least it sure looks that way. Along with James Foley, this would be two prominent leaders of the Homophobic Community and their Homophobic Agenda. In general, I'm not in favor of outing people. But there's something really problematic about Haggard's and Foley's behavior, more problematic, I think, than outing them. It's not simply a matter of hypocrisy, like having a pr0n library when you head up an organization that fights pr0n. There's some serious and bizarre self-hatred going on here, which you suspect has deep roots in the evangelical Christian community these guys grew up in. I don't know the personal childhood histories of Haggard and Foley, and I'm certainly not making excuses for either of them. But what do you prove with them when you out them? That they hate themselves? There's news. But maybe it's about hatred generally, and here maybe about self-hatred taught and learned from childhood in ostensibly loving but insidiously hate-filled communities, self-hatred that is then projected out onto the rest of the world, so that you do your penance for your own sin by punishing and even terrorizing others.

OK. Now I feel better about this. But it's still pretty fucked up, the whole thing.