Haggard

Ted Haggard, the disgraced pastor who resigned from his ministry in 2006 amid an embarrassing gay sex scandal, was back in his home town Wednesday to announce he was starting a new church in Colorado Springs.

According to the AP:

Haggard said his new venture would not be a megachurch like New Life Church, the congregation he founded in 1985 and then left in 2006 after a male prostitute said Haggard paid him for sex.

Haggard said he doesn’t know how many people will attend his new church, but he said the ordeal he and his wife, Gayle, went through has prepared them to help others.

“I have an incredible heart for broken people,” he said. “I think we’re qualified to hold people’s hands” in times of trouble.

Haggard, once an outspoken opponent of gay marriage, resigned as the head of his 14,000-member megachurch and as president of the National Association of Evangelicals in 2006 when male prostitute Mike Jones said that the pastor had been paying him for sex for the last three years and had bought methamphetamines from him.

The 53-year-old married father of five, also confessed to having had an inappropriate sexual relationship with Grant Haas, a 20-year-old male volunteer, in 2006.

Earlier this year, Haggard said he had discovered in therapy that he had been abused by a man when he was a child and that therapy has cured him of his gay “compulsions.”

Haggard said his new Saint James Church will be open to everyone, Republicans and Democrats, heterosexuals and homosexuals alike.

Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput said the decision by the Sacred Heart of Jesus School in Boulder not to let the children re-enroll conforms to church teachings.

The parents have chosen to remain anonymous but released a statement through the organization Boulder Pride:

“There are divorced parents, children of parents born out of wedlock, non-Catholics and non-practicing Catholics. Their eligibility has not been questioned. There seems to be a subjective rating system of which sins are more unacceptable.

“Perhaps our biggest objection to the school’s decision is that we think that it is wrong to punish a child for who the child’s parents are. We do not think this reflects what Jesus would have done.”

The school decided that the two children, whose ages are unknown, could not continue at the school despite having attended the pre-school there for three years.

According to the couple, both of their children have been baptized, and attend church regularly at Sacred Heart.

FORT COLLINS, CO — You know you have bad parents when they fool the the entire world into thinking that their six-year-old son is stuck in a balloon floating in the Colorado air. You know you have even worse parents when those same people allow their children to record a homophobic rap video, complete with lines like “I hate gay faggots, I hit ‘em with a bat,” and (possibly) “Faggot tried to pee on me.”

It’s official. The Balloon Boy saga has taken another turn for the absolute weird.

The story revolves around the Heene family in Colorado, and parents, Richard and Mayumi, who have three children — Falcon, Bradford and Ryo. The parents duped the world into believing that Falcon was caught in a balloon last week.

From there they did the world publicity tour, complete with Falcon throwing up on the Today Show after Meredith Vieira asked a question. That was followed by a weekend of police investigations, with a local Sheriff announcing that there’s probable cause for the parents to be arrested for staging the balloon incident.

And to add even more dysfunction to this story, a homophobic rap video has taken the Twitter and YouTube worlds by storm, in which the three boys rap to the tune of bashing gays, while the mother plays guitar and the father plays harmonica.

Nothing quite warms the soul like a group of six-to-ten year olds saying how much they want to throw rocks at faggots. See the video here:

More on this story from Michael Jones at Change.org.