Do I feel sorry for Ted Haggard?

Surprisingly, perhaps, the answer is: "yes".

I just watched a documentary about his life after he was forced from his position as a national leader of evangelicals in the USA for his sexual activity with another man.

I am uncertain as to the objectivity of the documentary. Haggard is portrayed as a really nice guy, doing the best he can in a tough situation. This may be true: but he's an amazing speaker, he excels at rhetoric, and he can carry a crowd. He knows how to say the right thing. So I am unconvinced that I am hearing the absolute truth here. Even if the documentary-maker is objective, Mr Haggard knows how to play to the media and to the crowd: he made a living from it for years, after all, and so I regard him in the same way I would regard a skilled politician - he sounds genuine, but is he? I remain on the fence.

So why do I feel sorry for him? Well, he and his family have lost friends and have been exiled from their home state (yes, in this day and age - exiled) for no other reason than his sexuality.

That's the bottom line: he's not hetreosexual, so he lost his job, his livlihood, many of his friends, and could well have lost his wife into the bargain.

How much simpler everything would have been if he could have simply been honest with his wife, his family, his friends, and his employers.

But because he isn't 100% heterosexual, and subscribes to a dogma which tells him that this makes him sinful rather than just human, he instead lead a secret life - which made him feel very guilty and unhappy. When his secrets were discovered, his life was destroyed.

So yes - I feel sorry for Ted Haggard and his family: he is a victim of the intolerance of dogmatic people. That he himself subscribed to that dogma I cannot blame him for: he was offered love, hope, and bliss. Who doesn't want that? In accepting it, Ted Haggard showed that he was human.

It is such a pity that in doing so, he had to deny that he was human and live a lie.

Some may say that he was hoist on his own petard, and to a certain degree this is true. But I think he has been a victim of the deceit of a religion* which claims to preach love but which actually practices hate.

* I do not refer to Christianity in general, but the specific sect to which Mr Haggard belongs. Though many other sects also preach hatred and intolerance, not all of them do.

It must be nice to be a wanker

It must be nice to be a wanker: to believe with all your heart that a thumping bass, an almost-nice car, and a slightly askew baseball cap are all that is needed to find your perfect mate - and be right.. every week.

It must be nice to be a wanker: to just know that gays are bad, or women should stay at home - without having to think too hard about why.

It must be nice to be a wanker: to be moved so much by simple rhetoric, and to vote for the man who sounds most generically like you do down the pub.

It must be nice to be a wanker: to live so free, and unencumbered by consideration or compassion.

It must be nice to be a wanker: to be astounded and fulfilled by day-time TV.

Oh! To be a wanker! Why do good things never happen to me?

Is terrorism being UNDER-reported in the media?

An interesting article came my way recently, via a facebook post of a friend. I must say that I was quite shocked when I read it. I am going to share the essential details, and then link you to the article itself.

Khalil Khan was found guilty recently of making bombs out of tennis balls. He aimed to kill many people, and had extremist literature in his house. He was arrested by chance at a railway station for an unrelated offence. His ex-girlfriend said that he was always a violent man, and had talked of killing his boss (I found this data when I googled his name, in an article on the BBC website).

The article I am about to link to says:

One veteran home affairs correspondent told me he had asked his editors why the trial wasn’t being covered. “They didn’t want to hear about it,” he said. “They just weren’t interested. It’s outrageous.”

In another case, Ali Shah was arrested,tried, and found guilty of posessing a huge amount of explosive material in his home which was:

described by police at the time of his arrest as the largest amount of chemical explosive of its type ever found in this country. The national coverage [of this story]... amounted to exactly 56 words in a single “news in brief” item in the Sunday Times.

There was almost no media coverage.

Or take the case of Ayaan Ali. Police found:

nail bombs, bullets, swords, axes and knives in his flat, as well as a note in which he had written, “I am so sick and tired of hearing... talk.. of blowing up churches, of fighting back. Only to see these acts of resistance fail to appear. The time has come to stop the talk and start to act.”

Again, there was very little interest in this story. Do you find this as shocking as I do? There are other cases described in the article I am about to link you to, and apparently none of them were given much coverage by the mainstream media.

I'll give you the link to the article in a moment, but before I do I want you to remember just how shocked you were, and why.

Now I have a small confession to make: I told a fib or two. I changed the names of the people I spoke about above, and I replaced the word "mosques" with "churches". But I left all the other facts alone. Every single one of those people was a white British citizen, and not a muslim.

Dutch people will have probably suspected this already, since "Ayaan Ali" was a (female) Dutch politician, who is an ex-Muslim and to say she's outspoken against Islam would be like saying that George W Bush likes Jesus a bit.

Here is the link.

My question to my readers is this: were you shocked by the first part my post above? And did your feelings change when you learned that the terrorists were not muslim, and not asian?

You should also google the names in the linked article. It claims that all these trials were hardly reported. But google the names, and you will find news reports.

The article claims that the total national news coverage for Robert Cottage (the BNP member jailed for the huge amount of explosive in his house) amounted to 56 words in The Sunday Times.

Yet google linked me easily and directly to a BBC article, published in 2007, which was well over 57 words in length. Admittedly it's a local article, not national. But it has quite a different slant: the defence stated that he intended to make "bangers", and when he was found guilty, he got less than three years. Is this a terrorist, or a fucked-up racist twat with a thing for making things go "bang"?

The linked article implies the former, but the BBC article implies the latter. Who is right? The linked article tells us it was the largest amount of an explosive material found: but does that mean that he had a lot of nitro cylerine stockpiled, or did he like dropping magnesium into water and watching it fizz?

What is meant by "explosive material"? We are not given that vital detail.

But regardless of bias and possible cherry-picking, the article has a valid point: I was not aware of these stories before now, and I would very much like to know why that is. Why have these acts of terrorism not been thrust into my face by the media as other acts of terrorism are? I agree with the central point of the article: had these guys really had the names which I attributed to them, then I am pretty sure I'd have seen their photographs on the front page.

The moral for today is this: question everything. No matter what the source, and no matter how much you insinctively agree. Including the links that I direct you to. Ask your own questions, and reach your own conclusions.

I leave you now, feeling safe in the knowledge that I have, as usual, been patronising to an annoying level. I am also feeling quite smug.