Divine Justice for a Less than Divine Hypocrite

Author's Note: This piece was begun on 11/3, but only finished and published on 11/10 because work interrupted it. I don't know why it still shows a date of 11/3, given that, but hopefully the reader isn't disoriented because it now references Tuesday's election and the Democrats gaining control of Congress on 11/7. Blogger gets on my nerves. /sigh

OK this story from last week was just too good to pass up writing about; I'd hoped to do it last week when I first saw it during my lunch hour, but work conspired again. I don't normally do hit and run posts (maybe I'd get more blog traffic if I did?) so it's late. But I'm a lover of delicious irony, particularly when it is in the form of the brutal smackdown of one of our nation's false prophets, and wanted to enjoy this moment.

Amongst the many truths my late mama told me, one of them was this:

God Don't -- and I do mean -- DON'T like ugly. And He (or She) sure ain't stuck on pretty.

Many of us of honest faith have known that sooner or later, even more of the ugly hypocrisy that beats in the heart of most right-wing evangelicals in the public eye here in America would be forced out into the light of day.

Last Wednesday through Friday was the Day. (OK so God's calendar isn't ours. You already knew that, if you call yourself a Christian.)

Which is why the Right Reverend (aka Pastor) Tim Haggard in Colorado, head of the infamous National Association of Evangelicals, Mr. Fire and Brimstone evangelical embracing every anti-Christian position from rabid homophobia to rank sexism to disbelief in the clear signs of global warming, Mr. "I Talk to the President Once a Week" is feeling the delicious comeuppance that only the light of The Truth can shine.

The good reverend is both a closet case *and* a meth head.

(Oh wait - he insists that he didn't actually use the crank he feloniously had in his possession. I guess that's why Rev. Haggard was caught on tape calling up his masseuse, Mike Jones aka Haggard's 3-year monthly honey bunny huggie boy -- begging to buy some more?)

The Christian that I am will pray for him. And his tens of thousands of followers, starting with the posers in this picture:



Why am I reminded of Children of the Corn when I look at this picture? When was the last time church going person actually saw an *entire congregation* purportedly "in the rapture of prayer" all striking the exact same pose - a pose reminiscent not of the supplication and humility of prayer before the Almighty, but of zombies from Night of the Living Dead reaching for their latest human victim hands outstretched, soullessly in an open-handed pose of "gimme?"

(If you, like me, have been to church a million times and have not, it gives you some indication that the congregants of the New Life Church might be posers just like their fallen pastor.)

I admit that as the person who is not yet completely cured of her less-than-Christian weaknesses I'm still laughing my ass off. In another world, Pastor Tim would be facing the same sort of public stoning that Tessie Hutchinson in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery faced, his warmest and closest of friends and neighbors and intimate instantly turned deliverer, sacrifer, and murderous enforcer, all in the name of law and order. The wages of hypocrisy, from those who he enabled in being hypocrites and pretenders to the faith.

So, since at this moment I'm feeling terribly hypocritical because I am happy that Tim Haggard got his bitchslap from the Lord at long last, and since I do consider myself to be a woman of faith who should be above such meanness, all I can do do is pray:

Forgive me, Lord: I know not what I do, rolling on the floor laughing at the rhetorical public hanging that poor benigted Reverend Haggard -- and he *is* haggard, have you seen him, Lord? I don't know how anyone would have slept with that ugly man, gay or straight -- has coming from his own flock.

I do have one request, though, Lord: Can you please send some of your justice love to that misogynist hypocrite who calls himself a pastor Mark Driscoll who calls himself a man of the cloth yet tried to pin Rev. Haggard's sick shit, from his hatred of his own gayness to his lying about getting his meth on, all on Haggard's wife "letting herself go? I don't know the woman, Lord, but from her pictures she still has it going on just fine. It's not her fault she married a gay man who wasn't man enough to admit that he was gay.......

And maybe send a little love to Emperor Bush too, who like his weekly phone buddy Rev. Haggard has an unexplained propensity for hanging out with gay prostitutes all while claiming that the perfectly normal homosexuality that you set forth in man and animal as part of your diverse plan for life was a sin?

Oh wait, you already sent a divine message to George W. Bush on Tuesday. I'm sorry. I forgot.

Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Lord.

(OK, OK, I'm a terrible person but not liar. Yes, yes, I know - I *do* know what I'm doing making mirth at his misery. I am a sinner. I confess. But it's still funny, and I have always believed that the Lord has always had a delicious sense of ironic humor, dispensing His unique form of justice. Praise God.)