Haggard rent boy inks book deal

That didn't take long: Mike Jones, the male hooker who outed right-wing Xtian Ted Haggard, has a book deal. The publish date is June and the publisher is Seven Stories Press.

Meanwhile I ran across this blog entry (courtesy some other evangelical's blog). In it the writer compares what he felt as a child when his family was shunned after his father was uncovered as a pedophile, and he is all concerned about protecting Ted Haggard's kids from the same public shame. Seems to miss the point, which is that Haggard himself helped to create the environment in which he is now shamed and mocked, by publicly condemning homosexuals and presenting himself as superior. His hard fall is a function of how high he rode that hobbyhorse before falling off.

But as for Haggard's children, they may be learning something entirely different from their father's situation than what the very concerned writer thinks they are learning. As we saw earlier this week, not only are many of Haggard's former followers so eager to demonstrate their pious forgiveness of his betrayal that they gave what I suppose are thousands of dollars for the family's support, but the congregation itself is calculating a severance package for the man. So what are the kids learning from that? That the consequences of extraordinarily bad behavior -- of lying to your family, your church, and Karl Rove; of tossing your reputation into the toilet; of doing drugs with a male prostitute -- are really not so bad?