The story about The Reverend Ted Haggard’s fall from grace has all the elements of a classic soap opera; sex, drugs, religion, politics and fame. For reporters and advertisers it’s the kind of story that makes viewers tune in and people buy papers. The sad truth is it’s also the kind of story that shatters people’s lives and breaks their hearts. I’m especially haunted by the photo of Ted Haggard’s wife and son that was printed in the New York Times on Saturday which seemed to illustrate the heartache. Haggard is sitting on the right hand side of the photo in the driver’s seat of the family car, a boom microphone is thrust through the passenger window just in front of Haggard’s wife and just behind Haggard is his pre-pubescent son. Both mother and son look strained and one can only imagine what they are thinking at that moment as news reporters swarm their car in the family driveway. Just a few days ago they were a seemingly perfect nuclear family of five children, a mom and a dad, living a normal life that is if normal means your dad tends to a flock of 12,000 church members and leads the National Association of Evangelicals. Then suddenly, a man stepped forward to accuse the head of this seemingly perfect household of paying him for gay sex and drugs over a three-year period. Everything these children and this woman once knew now seemed to be a lie.

Rev. Ted Haggard has since resigned from New Life Church and has been removed from his post as head of the National Association of Evangelicals. Hagggard at first denied knowing Michael Jones, then admitted hiring him for a massage and buying methamphetamine from him. The plot continues to thicken. Mr. Haggard insisted that he threw the drugs out before he used them and the two men never had sex.

Salon.com reports that a visiting pastor named Larry Stockstill read a letter from Haggard to his congregation on Sunday. In the letter, Mr. Haggard confesses that “The fact is I’m guilty of sexual immorality… Part of my life is so repugnant and dark…I’ve been warring against it all my life” Haggard’s wife Gayle has reportedly reaffirmed her commitment to her husband, which inspired a standing ovation in Haggard’s former church on Sunday.

I don’t pretend to be all wise and all knowing but age has taught me that you have to truly know yourself and accept every part of yourself and love yourself before you can truly love others. By denying his homosexuality or bi-sexuality Ted Haggard was living a lie and by because he hated his own sexuality he channeled his hatred toward homosexuality and continues to do so by calling it ‘repugnant and dark.’ By paying for sex with an anonymous stranger at a hotel he dove headfirst into the dark side he craved then climbed into the pulpit on Sunday mornings to repudiate homosexuals who would seek to validate long term relationships with their partners. How sick and how sad. I feel nothing but pity for Ted Haggard. I find it ironic that Haggard and his accuser Michael Jones look so much alike. The difference between the two men is slight. Evangelicals want to demonize gays as immoral, Satanic and out of the main-stream. The truth is they are exactly like you and me. They are our sisters, our brothers, our cousins, aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, friends, bosses and co-workers. Everyone knows someone who is gay and I would venture that nearly everyone has someone gay in their family, they may not be out but trust me homosexuals are everywhere. They don’t have horns, they don’t worship Satan, and they don’t have check lists of immoral behavior or a so-called homosexual agenda they wish to accomplish in society. They don’t have secret meetings; they don’t run the Democratic Party, they aren’t child molesters. They don’t all like Bette Midler or show tunes. Some are butch, some are fems, some like to decorate and some are slobs. The truth is they are people; they just like to have sex with the same sex. The truth is some are pretty boring; some don’t have any sex at all. The truth is I probably know more freaky heterosexuals than homosexuals. I love my homosexual friends and I know they want the same things from life I do, a good job, a nice home, friends, family, love, laughter and peace. They would like their life partners to inherit their property when they die and be able to sign their power of attorney, have equal legal rights as parents and live in peace. I just don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Evangelicals want this to be about a battle between good and evil, saving homosexuals from sin, they want to convert them to heterosexuality, to lead them from the dark side. They view homosexuality as a sin against God. But…if you believe that God doesn’t make mistakes, that God literally doesn’t make junk, then why would God create human beings with the innate “God given” need to be sexually intimate with a member of the same sex? That’s where the break down begins for me. If being homosexual feels right, why can’t we just leave them alone and let them be what God created them to be? What’s wrong with unconditional love and acceptance for our fellow man and woman, just the way God created them? What happened to “Judge not, least ‘ye shall be judged.” If we are all sinners in God’s eyes, then isn’t the sin of homosexuality, just one of the many sins we all are stained with on this earth? Wouldn’t we all be better off, just loving each other and trying our best each and every way to make the world a better place in our own small way? Not by amending our constitution to define marriage but by increasing the minimum wage to help the working poor feed their families or by volunteering to feed the poor?

Encouraging discrimination against any group of people doesn’t seem like a good foundation for any religion but when you mix discrimination, politics and religion it becomes a toxic elixir.