[This post was originally published on The Secular Outpost on November 25, 2006. It was republished here on November 7, 2021 with the date manually adjusted to reflect its original publication date. Unfortunately, the link has mysteriously disappeared from Patheos and I wasn't able to quickly find it when searching on YouTube.]
Here is the description of the video as provided at YouTube:
"Jon Stewart analyzes the latest gay surprise as the evangelical, gay-bashing preacher, Pastor Ted, gets caught with his three-year gay lover and supplier of crystal meth. What else is new? For an added bit of spice, there is an earlier clip of Haggard lecturing Richard Dawkins on arrogance. Just too beautiful."
While Haggard's behavior (buying crystal meth and a "massage" from a gay prostitute) are clearly hugely embarrassing to evangelical Christians, what is not so clear is whether anything of philosophical significance follows from his behavior. For example, I've heard many people refer to Haggard as a "hypocrite," but the fact is that Haggard never tried to marry a man and he never claimed that homosexuality is morally acceptable. On the contrary, Haggard made it very clear that he considered his behavior morally wrong -- and he seemed pretty sincere to me when condemned himself. I conclude that Haggard sincerely believes homosexuality is wrong, but he obviously has some sort of internal struggle with his sexual orientation that prevents him from consistently behaving in accordance with that belief.
What I find much more interesting is the portion of video where Dawkins gets into a somewhat heated exchange with Haggard over science. Haggard actually has the audacity to lecture Dawkins on "intellectual arrogance." Why? Because Dawkins pointed out the absurdity of Haggard's claim that evolution is the view that things like eyes and ears came about by "accident." As Dawkins correctly points out, no evolutionary biologist believes such a thing. That Haggard would make such a statement reveals his utter ignorance of contemporary science. It's okay if evangelicals like Haggard want to reject evolution (and even urge others to do so), but the least they can do is to actually reject evolution and not some Sunday school strawman version of it.
