You Can't Make This Shit Up

I try, but I just can't do it. My mind is a mess, but still has some link to reality.

Colorado Springs' New Life Church just announced that it has fired Pastor Ted Haggard for his "sexually immoral conduct." The much publicized meth and gay hooker scandal has elicited a little bit of soul searching and a lot hemming and hawing from Haggard's fellow Evangelical leaders, but perhaps the most ridiculous response came yesterday from Pastor Mark Driscoll of Seattle's Mars Hills mega-church-wannabe.
Writing in his personal blog, Driscoll offers his fellow pastors "some practical suggestions" on how to avoid the type of temptation that consumed Pastor Haggard. And near the top of his list?

"Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him either."

Uh-huh. Leave it to a fundamentalist Evangelical preacher to have such a profound understanding of human sexuality. Or as the inimitable sex columnist Dan Savage so aptly put it:

"I'm sure Ted Haggard is saying something along these lines to his wife right now: 'Oh, honey... I wouldn't have been having those meth-fueled ass-banging sessions with that gay hooker if you hadn't have let yourself go like that!' "

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