I love it when bad things happen to bad people.
I know how that sounds and I would apologize for it but I wouldn’t mean it. When I heard that Saddam was hanged a little part of me came alive, despite me being firmly in the anti-war camp. At least some good came out of the calamity that is Bush’s war. I also agreed with Hunter S. Thompson when he said that instead of a full presidential funeral and the honors that come with it, Richard Nixon’s corpse should have been burned in a dumpster behind a convenience store. And man, oh man, did it tickle me when I saw the public reaction to Judith Regan’s shameless attempt to make money for herself and OJ Simpson with that book and television special. People getting what they deserve is a beautiful and rare thing, a cause for celebration.
As sweet as just desserts can be there’s just something sweeter about it when it happens to the pious folks who are the self-appointed moral compasses of the masses. I’m talking about evangelicals.
These last few months saw the downfall of two of America’s biggest and most dangerous evangelicals; Ted Haggard and Kent Hovind.
Ted Haggard might be a familiar name to some of you. He was the head of the National Association of Evangelicals from 2003 until November 2006 when he was forced out. You see, Mr. Haggard is a bible literalist and that means he thinks that everything in the Bible is absolutely correct including Leviticus 18:22 which is very clear on the topic of homosexuality (it’s against it, big surprise). While I’m not surprised that Pastor Ted embraced the Bible’s ideology of hate I am surprised that he embraced a gay man.
In a gay way. A very gay sort of way.
It turns out that for the last three years Pastor Ted had been visiting a gay prostitute and the two of them were having a big ol’ meth-fueled gay time together. I feel absolutely terrible for his wife and children. As far as I’m concerned it isn’t anyone’s business how consenting adults pair off so I don’t begrudge him his perfectly human urges regarding sex and love. What disturbs me is that he’s apparently a self-loathing gay man who married some poor woman and somehow managed to impregnate her five times over. But it’s difficult to feel bad for Haggard himself after running his name through a search engine. The man is simply a hate-mongering Bible-literalist jackass of the highest order who got exactly what he had coming to him.
Kent Hovind is cut from the same cloth. He taught science (yes, a young-Earth creationist teaching science) for 15 years in Christian private schools despite having no formal education in science. In 1989 he founded the Creation Science Evangelism Ministry (“creation science,” an oxymoron if ever there was one). Hovind began giving speeches and lectures on creationism and according to the IRS he made over $1 million a year doing so. On January 19 he was sentenced to 10 years behind bars for 58 tax and tax-related offences and was fined $640,000 in restitution. Standing before the judge before being sentenced, a teary-eyed Hovind begged for leniency stating, “If it’s just money the IRS wants, there are thousands of people out there who will help pay the money they want so I can go back out there and preach.”
You’ll notice he didn’t use the word “teach.” That’s because he never was truly a teacher to begin with. He was preaching in a classroom environment, and he was preaching nonsense. He taught children that the Earth was a mere 6,000 years old despite the fact that scientists who study plate tectonics, geology, anthropology, biology and zoology all came to the conclusion that our world is roughly 4.6 billion years old, and they came to that conclusion independently of one another. They used varying methods and the evidence is mutually buttressed. Kent Hovind added up the names and ages given in the Bible.
How scientific.
With Haggard in disgraced seclusion and Hovind behind bars the world is only slightly a better place, but it is a better place. Sometimes the good guys win after all, and even if the victories are small ones we’ll just have to take what we can get.
