I suspect I’m not alone in being weary of Ted Haggard media coverage. But I thought I might mention another recent piece because so many readers sent it in and because it points to a few larger sins in journalism.
Cindy Schroeder, a longtime Cincinnati Enquirer reporter, penned a personal essay for her paper based on the fact that she knew Ted Haggard over three decades ago in high school. In some sense, the story is really interesting. She reveals things about Haggard that I never knew — namely that he was an award-winning high school journalist. She speaks glowingly of a series he ran on teenage sexuality and its risks. She reveals a bit about his parental and religious influences, too.
But even though she hasn’t talked to him since Gerald Ford was president, she has no qualms delving deep into his psyche. This might be a stretch, to say the least. She begins by noting the latest headlines on Haggard — the third-party account alleging Haggard is “completely heterosexual”:
I cringed at the irony of it all. Pastor Ted, the fallen evangelist who claimed to have a hotline to God and President Bush, the preacher who enjoyed bantering with his critics in the media, had once aspired to be one of them.
Thirty-three years ago, my name was linked with the future religious superstar’s in court depositions and news accounts, when we wrote about the sexual problems of our fellow teens. For much of our senior year, Ted and I were embroiled in a fight for a free high school press and our journalism adviser’s job.
Hotline to God? Calm down, sister. Ted Haggard might have claimed he had a special relationship with President Bush — but did he say anything terribly out of the evangelical mainstream as it relates to his relationship with God? On the other hand, the second paragraph is interesting and deals with something I’ve never heard about this newsmaker. She goes on to explain that everyone found Haggard easy to talk to, and that students began talking to him about problems with sexual activity, including pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. He begins working on a series:
The first story related anonymous accounts of students who’d dealt with the fallout from unprotected sexual encounters. Ted also wrote how we planned to report on available services for pregnant teens, compare local schools’ sex education programs, explain the laws applying to doctors treating pregnant teens, and report local churches’ roles in advising teens with sex-related problems.
While all of the students portrayed in our series were straight, I now wonder if this was when Ted discovered a part of his life that he would later describe as “so repulsive and dark that I’ve been warring against it all of my adult life.”
Because he once wrote about sex, it must have been a gateway to a life of deception and degenerate behavior? Why is this woman reporting? She should be a psychoanalyst! Or how about this part:
The aspiring journalist, who would later speak out against abortion as the leader of the National Evangelical Association, defended the series that had covered the legal aspects of abortion and told the school board: “There’s no excuse for (teenagers) to be ignorant in this day and age. … We simply told the facts as we found them.”
Ted Haggard, in his vocation as NAE head, speaks out against abortion. Ted Haggard, as a high school reporter, writes about abortion objectively. How, how is this worth noting?
She goes on to note that Haggard went to Oral Roberts University and that this was because his father bribed him with a new Monte Carlo T-top with an eight-track tape player. She says he stops being liberal-leaning in college (although I’m not sure either what that means or why she didn’t feel the need to substantiate that somehow). They lost touch early in college. Here’s how she ends the piece:
The Ted Haggard that I knew in high school would shun the hypocritical, homophobic dogma of Pastor Ted. He would become a model for the acceptance of others, regardless of their sexuality.
For her knowing Haggard so well, the statement’s a bit overdone, no? Evangelicals Concerned, which is the premier pro-gay caucus within evangelicalism, probably shares the reporter’s ultimate view. They think that if Haggard could have been open about his sexual desires, he and his church might have been spared the agony of the last few months. But they note something else about Haggard that seems lost on much of the nuance-deficient mainstream media:
Although the gay press has caricatured Haggard as rabidly antigay, he never made attacking homosexuals a hallmark of ministry, as has the Religious Right. Indeed, at great personal risk, he stood up to antigay churches that demanded he rescind his invitation to a (GLBT) Metropolitan Church choir’s participation in a massed Easter service and he commended the Supreme Court’s overturning of sodomy laws.
It’s just interesting to me that this gay evangelical group displays a more subtle and nuanced understanding of Haggard than a woman who thinks she knows him so well. What Schroeder says about Haggard may or may not be true. But to assume it based on a very tenuous and distant connection says more about her than him.
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Comments (10) |
February 18, 2007, at 3:47 am
I like this part:
Oooohh. Scary Christian zombie. If IU was anything like Michigan State and University of Michigan (and I’ll bet that it was), I can testify from personal experience that there was quite a bit of wild and reckless behavior. Like the guy on my floor who blacked out after a drinking binge and woke up in the vomit-covered back seat of a Cadillac parked at a mall ten miles from campus. Or the annual Cedar Fest ‘party’ in East Lansing that, more often than not, ended in a riot with overturned cars, fires and broken windows. Or the Naked Mile at Michigan, in which co-eds would run through the streets of Ann Arbor wearing nothing but their shoes, and then complain when creepy guys videotaped them. Or the Hash Bash.
Poor Christian-zombie-Ted missed out on all that.
Maybe a little binge drinking, drug abuse and promiscuity would have been good for him. You know, get it out of his system. People always do better in that kind of environment. Why, look what University of Michigan did for Ted Kacyzinski!
She also misses here:
As I’ve heard that tongue-in-cheek expression about the “Vatican”, it means Colorado Springs, not the National Association of Evangelicals; and if anyone was named “pope” of Colorado Springs, it would be James Dobson, not Ted Haggard.
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February 18, 2007, at 8:31 am
I love this comment:
So, not being sure what to say in response to her old friend, she decides the best option is to publically slander him? Nice.
To me, the entire piece felt like not only an opportunity to rip evangelicals, but also as an overblown excuse to name drop, as though she just can’t let this whole situation go without letting people know that SHE KNOWS TED HAGGARD.
Hey, I played baseball with the actor Jesse Bradford when I was in fifth grade. Maybe I can write an article chastising him for letting me down with his script choices. The 12 year old pitcher I knew would shun the standardless, artless hack who starred in “Swimfan”.
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February 18, 2007, at 10:58 am
The interesting part is that ‘everyone found Ted easy to talk to’ and started telling him confidences.
Now, maybe this is an indicator of wanting to be a journalist, or it could equally well be an indicator of the path he took - into ministry.
“Haggard went to Oral Roberts University and that this was because his father bribed him with a new Monte Carlo T-top with an eight-track tape player.”
Okay, *now* I see why she got the impression he wanted to be a newshound
C’mon, kiss-and-tell stuff like this isn’t reportage, it’s what the British satirical magazine “Private Eye” characterises as the ‘Glenda Slagg’ school of journalism. So, when are we going to get the real scoop on Ted from his kindergarten teacher who can exclusively reveal Ted’s Secret Gay Torment because he ran away when a four-year old girl tried to kiss him?
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February 18, 2007, at 12:21 pm
Classic. Martha, I must say, I always love your comments. If I’m ever in Ireland, we should hang. You and me. And Bono.
As Martha’s post intimated, it seems that Ms. Schroeder is trying a little too hard in this piece. Would it surprise anyone if someone mentioned her name to Haggard and he responded, “Schroe…Schroeder. Oh, um. Wasn’t she, like, on the school paper with me or something? I kinda remember talking to her maybe once or twice.”
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February 18, 2007, at 4:41 pm
If we all stayed exactly as we were in high school, then no one would go to class reunions.
This story made me think of the report on religious beliefs (from a month or two ago) that lumped together people aged 15-27, or some other ridiculous age span that combines high school, college, and post-college folks. For a lot of people, college is a watershed time for religious beliefs. For others, it’s when you get married or have your first child. Looks like Schroeder doesn’t get religion, and that may be the tip of the iceburg of what Schroeder doesn’t get.
Mollie, I fail to see the nuance in the statement that the Religious Right has made “attacking homosexuals” a hallmark of their “ministry”.
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February 19, 2007, at 5:13 am
This story made me think of the report on religious beliefs (from a month or two ago) that lumped together people aged 15-27, or some other ridiculous age span that combines high school, college, and post-college folks.
Hey, don’t you remember, the NYT made it official - you’re an adult at 15
[According to the NYT, a “majority” of women in the US aren’t married now - if “women” start at 15 (and a few other reason-defying statistical adjustments are made)]
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February 19, 2007, at 5:55 am
Does Ms. Schroeder consider the ways in which she has changed since she was seventeen or eighteen, or does she mean us to think she has never altered any of her opinions?
Certainly, at that age, I was quite convinced there were certain things I would never, ever do.
You know what? In the intervening twenty-odd years, I’ve done some of those things - some good, which I didn’t expect, some bad, which I regret.
That Ted Haggard changed, I can believe. That he did things he regrets, I can believe. That Cindy Schroeder at eighteen and Cindy Schroeder at fifty have never changed in the slightest - I hope that’s not so.
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February 19, 2007, at 9:44 am
Give the lady some slack! We now have a perspective about Pastor Ted we did not have. Those that are interested have some issues to explore relative to flip flopping life styles as a person matures.
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February 19, 2007, at 4:33 pm
Joseph, the part which makes me, anyway, go “Huh?” is the absolute assurance with which, based on a few years’ acquaintance with Ted in high school, Cindy immediately launches into an oracular pronouncement on how, if only he hadn’t been ‘bribed’ by his father to go to this hick hayseed university, the Ted she knew would have been an avatar of all the approved liberal virtues.
Yes, he was brainwashed and zombiefied into becoming a self-hating homophobe and gay basher due to the malign influence of a university where he lost all his ‘liberal-leaning’ self.
If he had only not succumbed to his father’s influence, he would have - not might have, but *would* have - become a journalist who was, like Cindy herself, sound on the right issues.
Hindsight being the marvellous thing it is, it’s only thirty years on that it strikes her to wonder if Ted found out he was gay when researching this school story on teenage sexuality.
No questioning of is Ted gay or bisexual or maybe just very confused; no questioning of how he’s automatically anti-gay because he’s a minister; no questioning of the ‘right’ career he should have pursued - all based on a year or two back when they were eighteen years old.
“He would become a model for the acceptance of others, regardless of their sexuality.”
That’s not just ‘milking a story on the thinnest grounds’, that’s ‘writing alternate history’ which can be an intriguing exercise (suppose Lincoln had lost the Presidental election? suppose JFK survived the assassination attempt?) but has no relevance as ‘reporting the facts of a story’.
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February 19, 2007, at 6:50 pm
Martha, I went back and read her first person account of her interactions with Ted Haggard and her thoughts about them. It is listed as an opinion and I believe it gives readers an insight into Ted Haggard that has been missing in the news articles. Each of us may evaluate her comments based on our experiences and accumulated knowledge. The ones to dispute her account are Ted Haggard and the people who knew them during the years when they were colleagues. I also noted there were some very positive comments following her opinion piece.
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