No matter where you sit theologically, youve got to feel bad for the American evangelical Christian community in how many times, it seems, their people who hold high stature fall as humans. The Ted Haggard scandal still too amorphous and unfolding today to know where it will lead is just the latest bombshell. Critics say it is karma, that self-righteous and self-appointed moralists get what they have coming to themselves. And there are those who insist the most high-and-mighty talk with such bravado and righteousness to repress their pitiful and private sinfulness — i.e. Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, J. Edgar Hoover, Aimee Semple McPherson and Congressman Mark Foley. Surely we have had evidence to show that self-hating, closeted gays can be highly anti-gay in their public work and activity as a suppression-of-guilt mechanism.Wed be wise to be realists and believe no group faith, government, entertainment, media, education, sports, etc. is immune from having flawed people who get headlines because they have achieved a place of respect only to have their dark sides exposed.. No matter how high people may rise in their fields, we should not assume that they passed some good test and that they cant and wont shock us. A tip-off is often how vociferous some people can be in condemning others. It may be a hint that they are utter hypocrites.Shame on Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and head of a 14,000-member megachurch in Colorado Springs, Colo., for such duplicity to speak out against gay marriage, then have some kind of a covert relationship with a gay escort who provided him with methamphetamines. In my more than 40 years of being part of media, I have seen detestable people who have climbed over others to get higher in management and/or move on to other realms. In my deepest cynicism, I say that many people only get to the top because they have been ruthless, insensitive and so driving that it doesnt matter whom they trample to get there. Seemingly, in some fields like politics, survival to reach leadership is only achieved by deposing others.There is a fundamental mistake in thinking that those who make religious work their profession are necessarily going to be sinless saints. Just as we find a common pattern that those who go into psychiatry, more often than not, having deep psychiatric and behavioral problems or needs, so it may follow that those who take on ministry to shape how others live and act may have the most need for it themselves and cannot control urges to reach people in weird ways. Take philandering pastors. Given their work of intimate discussion, counseling from a highly respected position of power, it may not be so strange that they can fall shamelessly in love with parishioners who need hugs and shoulders to cry on.As I watch the Haggard story unfold and as more information comes out, it conjures how scandals unravel first the denial, then admission to pieces of wrongdoing, then its explodes into full, seamy revelation. We saw so much of that in the interminable Catholic child pedophile scandals — cover-ups for years before the Catholic Church faced up to it. Like it or not, we expect more from clergy because they are supposed to be grounded in religious ethics and the discipline that comes with it. Evangelicals are more vulnerable to the shame of scandal, I suspect, because they make family values a bigger deal and set themselves up for a farther fall. And it seems that other faiths better understand the human condition and have a healthier and more balanced understanding of sex and sexual diversity, all of it part of Gods creation, like it or not.

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