If you’re like me—and really, you should be—you enjoy sipping a strong cup of black coffee each morning as you seek out snippets of unintentionally-absurdist humor in the New York Times.  This past Tuesday, during my daily perusal, I happened to stumble across a gem of a story lifted off the AP wire about the disgraced Rev. Ted Haggard.

As you probably remember, Haggard—a former preacher at one of those evangelical mega-churches in Colorado Springs, Colorado—resigned his post in November when it was revealed that not only had he habitually partaken in sex acts with a male prostitute, but he was also a fan of snorting crystal meth.  What really made the story so delicious, though, was that in addition to founding his church, Haggard was an instrumental player in the rise of Focus on the Family—you know, that ultra-conservative, vehemently anti-gay political organization that holds so much sway in today’s Republican Party.

So, long story short, Haggard has been undergoing “intensive counseling” under the tutelage of his evangelical brethren for the past month, and, lo-and-behold, their finding was that Haggard is undeniably straight.  Now, my gut reaction to such a story would normally be to throw out some kind of bemused barb, such as, “Heh, that must be a fabulously comfortable closet.”  But I think if we look closely at what these guys are saying, it presents us with quite a provocative—though obviously unintentional—stance.

The story quotes the Rev. Tim Ralph—one of the ministers who oversaw Haggard’s counseling and unofficial spokesperson for the group—as saying, “He is completely heterosexual. That is something he discovered.  It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn’t a constant thing.”  That’s an interesting choice of words.  Completely heterosexual.  If we dissect that semantically, it means that he is wholly heterosexual; not in the slightest bit homosexual.  But when you say that someone is completely heterosexual, you are also necessarily implying that they could be partially heterosexual, too. Just a bit gay, so to speak.  This becomes even more fascinating if we look carefully at the way Ralph parses the claim. “It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn’t a constant thing.”  It would seem to me that he’s implying Haggard isn’t gay because these were just isolated acts, not an identity that he ascribed to.

Now, let’s take all of what Ralph said together, and see if we can decode some kind of coherent message in it.  By my estimation, he’s essentially asserting that a person’s sexuality can exist in varying degrees, and that sexuality is, in fact, more of a projected image according to one’s social identification, rather than a definite position that is determined by individual acts.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears that the Rev. Ralph and Co. are espousing what most men in their position would consider dangerously progressive views.

Indeed, what they’re describing is less akin to the classic fundamentalist view of homosexuality as a diseased choice looked down upon by God, and more like the sexually-relativist theories of Michel Foucault.  Foucault—the late, great French philosopher and historian—spent the last years of his life constructing a discourse on the nature and history of the perception of human sexuality.

The gist of his findings was basically that the entire concept of human sexuality is an arbitrary distinction that was socially created in early modern times.  Meaning that, as late as the seventeenth century, there was no concept of gay or straight.  You were just male or female, and whomever you chose to have sex with was completely incidental to your identity.  It wasn’t until certain puritanical strains of thought came into vogue that people who were predominantly attracted to their own sex were bracketed off into the distinct class of “homosexual,” and as a result, the concept of heterosexuality was born as an analog to it.

Perhaps the profundity of this would be clear to you, dear reader, if I explained that Foucault existed somewhere between Liberace and Tom Cruise in terms of his sexual proclivities (Tommy Boy totally digs dudes, in case you were wondering).  He was certainly not the type of French intellectual with which those on the religious right would normally want their sexual views to align. But as he would have it, humans do not fit naturally into the categories of “gay” and “straight.”  In reality, their sexuality exists on a continuum, with one pole for their own sex, one pole for the opposite sex, and their attraction fitting somewhere in between.  The “choosing of sides” that we do today is completely a social construct of modernity.  This theory, which took Foucault years to articulate and is still not generally accepted, seems quite logical to me now.  And apparently, on some level, it seems logical to Haggard’s counselors too.

Now, do I think Ralph and all of his buddies on the Christian Right realize that this is the implication of their words? Certainly not. But what I do think is at work here is the nature of their language unraveling itself.  Because they necessarily exist in a linguistic community that existed before them (and the concept of sexuality) and will—assumedly—continue to exist long after they’re gone, the self-contradictory nature of their beliefs cannot help but be exposed when their words are analyzed. In fact, I would argue that the hidden kernels in anything they, you, or even I say could be decoded in this way.  So maybe one day they’ll get hip to this fact and come to the same conclusion that they’ve already subconsciously enunciated.  But until that day comes, I’ll be sitting here, nursing my coffee, flipping through the Times, and ironically enjoying my detached disdain for humanity.