Double Standard

From Sullivan's blog, I found a link to David Frum's reaction to the allegations that the prominent evangelical leader, Ted Haggard, has been employing the servies of a male prostitute while high on crystal meth.

Frum frames the left's uproar over the issue as: "See, he's no better than anyone else." The left's glee in this, he charges, is out of toppling a high-and-mighty man, exposing his weaknesses and therefore ridiculing the ideals he stood for. Something like: "This man had ideals that he himself could not live up to."

This straw man liberal that Frum has constructed looks like quite the fool when Frum turns the tables on him and suggests that a man who tries to lead a moral live and fails is better than the man who makes no attempt to lead a moral life. The "hypocracy" that liberals accuse Haggard of, of knowing the difference between right and wrong but being unable to choose right, that hypocracy is more admirable than the bandit homosexual who unclosets himself, chosing wrong with an open distain for right.

Frum misses the point, almost purposefully.

The glee that I feel (I guess I'm that evil leftist) over this revelation is based on two ideas:

1) The moral compass that Haggard has tried to steer his life by points the wrong direction. He is wrong in saying that homosexuality is evil. Frum's argument is first framed on the premise that homosexuality is evil; the rest of his discussion requires the reader accept the premise. I reject that premise.

2) Those who most loudly condemn homosexuality are those who feel its "evil pull;" those who feel confronted with the choice between doing the right thing and doing that gay prostitute. If you're loudly criticial of homosexuality, it's because you're gay.

It is in this second idea that the notion of hypocracy arises. The hypocracy is not in saying that gay sex is evil and yet having gay sex anyways; the hypocracy is in asserting homosexuality is a choice (as murder is a choice) while KNOWING that the pull he feels towards homosexual behavior is not under his control. Haggard knows he is a homosexual and that the behavior is a result of who he is; he cannot correctly assert that he simply enjoys the behavior and is drawn to the behavior despite being straight.

Unfortunately for him, he lives in an evangelical culture that condemns homosexuality so roundly that he has no choice but to resist his homosexual tendancies. He can't be who he was born to be without being ostracized. And so his resistance turns into rabid defiance. The only way to control his behavior is to speak out against its source constantly. And his rabid hatred produced his rise in the community that supported that condemnation. Eventually he feeds the fire of hatred and intollerance in the community whose hatred and intollerance pushed him in the direction he was forced to follow. In physics, this would be called a positive feedback loop. A community of hatred that produces objects of its hate will continue to formet its own hatred.

The only escape is a radical meltdown of that society. It's what I hope for, that some day the evangelicals will realize the lunacy of their precepts and finally reject them. Haggard's position of prominence in the evangelical society and his very public and very poorly timed meltdown may break the positive feedback loop.

But I doubt it. Haters like their hatred.