Merle He Ain't.

I had a thought about the former Reverend Ted Haggard today. Not to kick the man when he's down, although I'm certainly not a fan. As is now well known, Haggard was an evangelical preacher, one of the celebs of the genre, who fought long and hard against legal same-sex marriage, but was outed by a gay prostitute whom Haggard apparently paid for sex.

Here's the thing that puzzles me: Haggard is an attractive and charismatic guy. Which means he didn't have to pay for it. What gives? Did the taboo of prostitution, on top of the taboos of gay sex, adultery and drug use, push the activity even further from Haggard's regular life, and make it seem more distant and unconnected from his Good Clean Christian life? Or did he think that by paying a professional he was buying discretion? I'd imagine a prostitute who outs johns doesn't stay in business long. Maybe the prostitute needed real courage to speak up; he may have ended his career, such as it was.

On a totally unrelated note, my parents tell me they had a poetry reading evening service at their church and it went over remarkably well. Our church did the same for the Sunday Morning service recently, and it was a delight. It's interesting to me that people are grooving on poetry, they're doing it in groups, and they're doing it at church.