Ted Haggard’s wife explains why she stayed
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Ted Haggard’s wife, Gayle Haggard, has just released a memoir explaining why she chose to stick by her husband. Haggard, of course, is the evangelical megachurch leader who was caught having various affairs with men. The discovery forced Haggard to step down as leader of New Life Church and as president of the National Association of Evangelicals.
RNS spoke to Gayle upon the release of her book “Why I Stayed: The Choices I Made in my Darkest Hour.”
“The reason I chose to stay with Ted was because I knew that there was more to the story than just the scandal in our lives,” she said Tuesday (Jan. 26) as the book was released, “that my husband was truly a great man on many levels and I wasn’t willing to deny all the good that we’d built in our marriage, in our family and in our church.”
What’s interesting is that in the book she writes that Ted confessed early in the marriage that he struggled with sexual attraction to men. Still, she says their sexual relationship “had always been strong and satisfying, and I didn’t believe for one instant that Ted had been regularly visiting a gay escort.”
So it seems neither she nor he were completely in the dark about Ted’s, shall we say, dual nature.
What has struck me as most heartbreaking about the situation is the way bisexuality or homosexuality is perceived as an illness almost, though of course, I can see how acting on that proclivity in the context of a marriage is wrong.
Haggard’s wife says in the end she chose forgiveness to be their coping method.
“It seemed as though everyone was pulling away from him and he was suffering enough, and I wanted to draw near to him and love him and show him forgiveness.”
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Watching the Haggards’ appearance on Larry King Live was intriguing to an extent. That intrigue had nothing to do with Gayle’s choice to stay with Ted. The concept of couple staying married–regardless of the obstacles–isn’t new to me. This gay, liberal Democrat was raised in a church, which was as much or more conservative than Haggard’s place of worship.
However, I found his attempts to explain away his possible gayness interesting. He pinned his homosexual activities to a forced childhood encounter. When King and various callers questioned that stance, Ted said pondering his gayness wasn’t possible. He wasn’t gay.
Still more intriguing was his refusal to condemn the “gay lifestyle.” (Calm down, I’m sarcastic.) It seemed–to me anyway–Ted was trying not to condemn himself.
And another interesting realization surfaced. This situation has transformed Gayle into the preacher of the house and Ted into a “preacher’s wife.”
Her book and speaking engagements are going to go a long way to establish her as a darling of the “ex-gay” movement.