Haggard's 'Prick and Anguish'

As I told some friends recently, the only Haggard I have ever liked was named Merle.

So this Ted Haggard - a political evangelical who met with the President on Mondays to make sure the Conservatives had the votes from the megachurch madness crowd - is yet another gay-basher who is apparently gay. Or wrestling with the question of being gay or not, while campaigning the government for ways to stop gays from being married.

Yes, the jokes were all over the Web yesterday and will be for some time. In some of the back and forth laughter at a Fallen Neo-Con Angel, I made the comment that I think many church folk secretly wish for a flawed, hypocritical pastor. It humanizes the pastor and makes the membership rest a little easier with their own Sin.

Just recall the sexcapades of Bakker, Swaggart, etc etc.

And then I was presented this fine excerpt from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter:

". . . the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in his sacred office. He won it, indeed, in great part, by his sorrows. His . . . power of experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a state of preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily life."

See, even the earliest Americans knew about the dangers of a political "moral majority" (which isn't either one).