In the footage from the reporter who caught up to Ted Haggard and his family this morning, I noticed that his wife Gayle, sitting in the passenger seat, seemed utterly shell-shocked about the news. I suspect that she had an idyllic image of her husband which now lays shattered, an image bound up in their shared religious beliefs.
I have read several articles discussing the misogynistic aspect of his kind of evangelism (like this story about a flock in Seattle), where their interpretation of the Bible compels them to believe that the wife must always submit to the husband, as the husband submits to Jesus. This doesn't come from Jesus, but from something Paul wrote in Ephesians. Scripture and commentary on the flip.
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. - Ephesians 5:22-5:24, KJV
For Ted to have failed his wife in this manner, I believe that most of us, if placed in a similar position, would feel angry, upset, betrayed, etc., and we would probably express that to our spouses if we found out that he had been doing something like this, at the very least with our body language. For Pentacostal types, as dogemperor has touched on in her excellent diary series, it is definitely much, much worse to deal with. Because talking back to your husband is like talking back to Jesus, and your husband sexually sinning is like Jesus sexually sinning: it's almost unthinkable. I feel sorry for both the women and the men forced into this master/slave relationship (and not the fun, BDSM kind of master/slave relationship, either).
I also want to share this article that I found from Googling "haggard believes wife submit husband" to try to find some mysognistic quotes from the ex-Reverend. Instead, I found a story in Nerve.com which shows Ted's homosexual urges almost bursting through the wall of denial. Some quotes:
Of course, if you ask Dobson why homosexuality looms so large in the evangelical mind, he'll tell you it's because godless humanists planted it there by way of subversive signals in our television programming. Ask Pastor Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and good cop to Dobson's bad cop at the top of the evangelical world, and he'll offer a more nuanced answer. Like most fundamentalists, Haggard believes that sexual sin is among the worst; he also knows it is the most common. Evangelicals, he'll say, aren't more obsessed with sexuality these days; rather, homosexuals are, somehow, more homosexual. The official line is that gay marriage marks a tipping point (Haggard, like many evangelicals, is a fan of Malcolm Gladwell's book of that name) into wholesale hedonism. The unofficial line, among leaders such as Haggard and Dobson is that it's a fight their side has already lost.
And whose fault is all this hedonistic temptation (besides Satan, and demons, and
territorial spirits, naturally)?
But with Christian womanhood restored and redeemed, a crucial character in the Christian conservative morality play has gone missing: the seductress. It is no longer acceptable to speak of loose women and harlots, since sexual promiscuity in a woman is the fault of the man who has failed to exercise his "headship" over her. It is his effeminacy, not hers, that is to blame. And who lures him into this spiritual castration? The gay man.
No wonder the ex-Rev. reminded so many of us of the Patrick Swayze character from
Donnie Darko. I suppose our dear leader would pointing out that "repressing all that gay temptation is hard work." Why can't people just accept their sexualities and be happy? Oh, yeah, because of guys like Ted Haggard and James Dobson.