Things are getting queer in the Colorado church massacre mystery. Not only did shooter Matthew Murray wrote about Ted Haggard in ominous online rants, but the disgraced pastor reportedly had a presence in Murray’s home:
Among the items taken from a search of gunman Matthew Murray’s home was a picture of former New Life pastor Ted Haggard, according to police documents released Wednesday.
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[Murray wrote] that Haggard was his mother’s favorite pastor and in a post about four hours before the shootings at New Life, he wrote that Christianity to him was “hate, abuse (sexual, physical, psychological, and emotional), hypocrisy, and lies.”
We can’t say Haggard personally had anything to do with the sexually “deviant” Murray’s mental problems, but his centrality in this horrible situation definitely says something: the repressive Evangelicals are destroying their tribe. But maybe we’re just reading too much into this…
Lone Ranger and Tonto
Spiritual violence is toxic and kills.
Jack Jett
My bet is on Haggerd did the boy.
There is so much more to this story that is just itching to come out……but maybe it wants to wait until after the birthday celebration of Jeebus.
todd
Haggard is the Judas Priest of tele-evangelists!!
dvlaries
According to Mike Jones’s book, “I Had To Say Something,” New Life paid Haggard off in February this year to shut up and go away, contingent on his never mentioning his gay sex history in public again. Our only hope is other boyfriends ( or hustlers) coming forward with their stories. …Unless we’re telling ourselves Ted’s only gay hook-up waited till he was 46 to get started. đ
alan brickman
what a surprise he went “crazy” with this bigotry all around him…
Bill Perdue
Alan, you’re right. I don’t think he’s crazy at all. We already know that not everyone survives the theocrats abuse. It looks like he got hurt so badly he wanted out and took some of them with him. What he did wasn’t unique and that’s why the theocrats get so hysterical about it.
R.I.P. Matthew Murray
Rob M
It’s ironic that Ted Haggard is villainized by those who know him only from a man who by his own admission probably only spent one hour a month with him a few years. There were people at New Life church who spent thousands or in some cases tens of thousands of hours with him over a course of 25 years, who knew him as a caring, warm, friendly, and truly nice person.
Any pastor in America in an evangelical church pretty much has to go along with the “party line” on homosexuality, even if he may disagree with it personally, just a politician can’t openly disagree with their party line all the time.
Out of thousands of public messages given by Ted, only a few “soundbites” were taken to portray him as a hypocritic. Probably in his personal life he was very kind and caring and sympathetic to gays, just as he was throughout Mike Jones’s experience with him and even after Mike outed their relationship.
If Mike hadn’t decided to portray Ted as a hypocritical anti-Gay rights” person instead of the true person he had come to know and from whom he willingly accepted a couple hundred bucks from each month, the gay population wouldn’t hate him so much. On the contrary, if Mike had handled it differently, Ted might have become a very valuable friend in a key position of influence, instead of a discraced hypocrite.
Mike, on the other hand, probably has significantly hurt the livelihood of the group to which he belonged. I wouldn’t be surprised if a high percentage of people in prominent positions who were seeing an male escort privately, likely decided to suddenly disappear when the realization that the person they had been seeing might expose them and write a book about it and go on a national publicity tour.
I have known Ted for years, and my brother has known him from the time when he started New Life church in his basement. Ted is a truly nice human being. 10,000 to 14,000 people a week wouldn’t have come to hear him speak if he’d been the fire-breathing weirdo he seems to be portrayed as in the gay community.
As someone who is not gay, it personally made me see gays a lot more favorably to discover that someone I respected as much as Ted had gay desires. But the animosity and hatred and stereotyping of Christians in general and Ted in particular conveys the opposite.
Mike Jones impulsively destroyed the life and reputation of a client who trusted him. A lot more good might have come of it had it all been handled differently. You might have had a powerful champion for your cause instead of just a scapegoat.
Skeptic
@Rob M: I’d really be interested to hear you explain just under what circumstances Ted Haggard could have been persuaded to be a champion for gay rights. He obviously wasn’t planning on coming out on his own. I don’t know what Mike Jones could have said differently that would have made Haggard acknowledge his sexual orientation openly rather than decide he needed overseers and then claim to have straightened himself out. What do you think Jones could have said that would have gotten Haggard to act differently?