Not bad for melodrama

National Catholic Reporter
A year ago we lamented in this space the disappearance of the U.S. Catholic bishops. Well, we meant that in a metaphorical sense. They hadn’t actually disappeared; they had just become far less visible on the national scene than in an earlier era.
Here’s how we put it: “We are watching the disintegration of a once-great national church, the largest denomination in the United States, into regional groupings bent on avoiding the spotlight and the big issues.”
We noted that there was war and starvation everywhere; fresh clergy sex abuse reports out of Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Spokane, Wash., to name a few; 20 percent of U.S. parishes without a pastor; a Congress poised to reduce health care coverage and food stamps; the United States accused of torture and keeping combatants in secret prisons; and so on. And the bishops had nothing to say. They would talk only to each other about internal church matters.
We are compelled, then, to report that the bishops have not entirely disappeared. For they gathered again, in Baltimore this year, and, continuing their trip inward, issued documents on such burning issues as birth control, ministry to persons with “a homosexual inclination,” and how to prepare to receive Communion. Now, none of these matters is unimportant. Don’t get the wrong impression. We’ve had documents aplenty about all of them before. And these topics -- unlike the war in Iraq, say, or what it means to have a president and vice president endorsing torture -- are even covered in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
So why again? Apparently the bishops feel that people just aren’t listening. If that’s their hunch, we’d agree. Why aren’t they listening? Let’s consider for starters the document on contraception. A lot of the U.S. bishops today might say there are a lot of bad, or at least ignorant, Catholics out there, Catholics influenced by the contraceptive culture, for instance, who no longer know good from evil.
Maybe they’re right. More likely, though, it’s because the teaching makes little sense, doesn’t match the experience of lay Catholics and tends to reduce all of human love to the act of breeding.
In short, the bishops aren’t terribly persuasive or clear when they talk about sex, and they tend to want to talk about sex a lot. To be sure, they say lots of lovely and lofty things about marital love, about how it completes people and cooperates with God’s plan and fills married lives with joy and happiness. You can want not to have children, say the bishops, you just can’t do anything “unnatural” about it. It’s a strange concept, like not wanting to die of heart disease while not doing anything “unnatural” about it.
They make the point that if every time a married couple makes love they are not open to having children, then they’re not giving “all” of themselves to each other. If you use birth control, say the bishops, and every single act is not open to having children, then “being responsible about sex simply means limiting its consequences -- avoiding disease and using contraceptives to prevent pregnancy.” Whew! So that’s it, eh?
It’s either be open to having kids or married sex is no more significant than an encounter with a prostitute. Such a view of marriage and sexuality and sexual intimacy can only have been written by people straining mightily to fit the mysteries, fullness and candidly human pleasure of sex into a schema that violently divides the human person into unrecognizable parts. There’s a reason 96 percent of Catholics have ignored the birth control teaching for decades. We doubt the new document will significantly change that percentage.
So it is with gays. Here again, church authorities try to fit together two wildly diverging themes. They go something like this: Homosexuals are “objectively disordered” (that’s about as bad as it humanly gets, in our understanding of things), but we love them and want them to be members of our community.
Only this time out, the bishops are not using the term homosexual “orientation” (a definite position) but homosexual “inclination” (a liking for something or a tendency toward). Sly, no? The inference to be drawn, we presume, is that someone inclined one way can just incline another way, whereas someone with an orientation is pretty much stuck there.
That science and human experience generally say otherwise is of little concern, apparently, though the bishops were clear they weren’t suggesting that homosexuals are required to change. This time, too, the bishops, while acknowledging that those with homosexual tendencies should seek supportive friendships, advise homosexuals to be quiet about their inclinations in church. “For some persons, revealing their homosexual tendencies to certain close friends, family members, a spiritual director, confessor, or members of a church support group may provide some spiritual and emotional help and aid them in their growth in Christian life. In the context of parish life, however, general public self-disclosures are not helpful and should not be encouraged.”
The next paragraph in the document, by the way, begins, “Sad to say, there are many persons with a homosexual inclination who feel alienated from the church.” You can’t make this stuff up.
It is difficult to figure out how to approach these documents. They are products of some realm so removed from the real lives of the faithful one has to wonder why any group of busy men administering a church would bother. They ignore science, human experience and the groups they attempt to characterize. The documents are not only embarrassing but insulting and degrading to those the bishops are charged to lead. The saddest thing is that the valuable insights the bishops have into the deficiencies and influences of the wider culture get buried.
Where is this all going?
No one’s come out with a program, but we’ll venture yet one more hunch. It has become apparent in recent years that there’s been an upsurge in historical ecclesiastical finery and other goods. We’ve seen more birettas (those funny three-peak hats with the fuzzy ball on top that come in different colors depending on clerical rank) and cassocks (the kind with real buttons, no zippers for the purists) and ecclesiastically correct color shoes and socks, lots of lacy surplices and even the capa magna (yards and yards of silk, a cape long enough that it has to be attended by two altar boys or seminarians, also in full regalia). In some places they’re even naming monsignors again.
It’s as if someone has discovered a props closet full of old stuff and they’re putting it out all over the stage. Bishops, pestered by the abuse scandal that they’ve avoided looking full in the face, find it easier to try to order others’ lives. They have found the things of a more settled time, a time when their authority wasn’t dependent on persuading or relating to other humans. It was enough to have the office and the clothing. Things worked. Dig a little deeper in the closet and bring out the Latin texts, bring back the old documents, bring back the days when homosexuals were quiet and told no one about who they essentially are. Someone even found a canopy under which the royally clad leader can process.
Now that’s order.
Now that’s the church.
Bring up the lights a little higher so all can see.
Before it all fades to irrelevance.
National Catholic Reporter, November 24, 2006

50 Shots Fired, and the Experts Offer a Theory
Experts suggested that "contagious shooting" played a role in the police shooting of a bridegroom in Queens.
It is known in police parlance as "contagious shooting" - gunfire that spreads among officers who believe that they, or their colleagues, are facing a threat. It spreads like germs, like laughter, or fear. An officer fires, so his colleagues do, too.
The phenomenon appears to have happened last year, when eight officers fired 43 shots at an armed man in Queens, killing him. In July, three officers fired 26 shots at a pit bull that had bitten a chunk out of an officer's leg in a Bronx apartment building. And there have been other episodes: in 1995, in the Bronx, officers fired 125 bullets during a bodega robbery, with one officer firing 45 rounds.
Just what happened on Saturday is still being investigated. Police experts, however, suggested in interviews yesterday that contagious shooting played a role in a fatal police shooting in Queens Saturday morning. According to the police account, five officers fired 50 shots at a bridegroom who, leaving his bachelor party at a strip club, twice drove his car into a minivan carrying plainclothes police officers investigating the club.
The bridegroom, Sean Bell, who was to be married hours later, was killed, and two of his friends were wounded, one critically.
To the layman, and to the loved ones of those who were shot, 50 shots seems a startlingly high number, especially since the men were found to be unarmed. And police experts concede that the number was high. Yet they also note that in those chaotic and frightening fractions of a second between quiet and gunfire, nothing is clear-cut, and blood is pumping furiously. Even 50 shots can be squeezed off in a matter of seconds.
Cooperative agreement between SPIEGEL ONLINE and the "New York Times"SPIEGEL ONLINE and the online version of the "New York Times" offer their readers a special service. Approximately twice a week, you can read selected analyses and commentary from the "New York Times" on SPIEGEL ONLINE. In return, our colleagues in New York will publish selected and translated articles from DER SPIEGEL on their website each week."We can teach as much as we can," said John C. Cerar, a retired commander of the Police Department's firearms training section. "The fog of the moment happens. Different things happen that people don't understand. Most people really believe what it's like in television, that a police officer can take a gun and shoot someone out of the saddle."
The five officers involved in the shooting were placed on administrative duty yesterday - without their guns - as the Police Department and the Queens district attorney investigated the circumstances surrounding the shooting, and relatives of Mr. Bell, joined by the Rev. Al Sharpton, staged a rally and a march to demand answers.
The officers have not yet been interviewed by police investigators or prosecutors to give their account.
Again and again, the focus of the day returned to the number of bullets that went flying.
One of the officers fired more than half the rounds, pausing to reload, and then emptying it again, 31 shots in all, according to the police. Another officer fired 11 shots. The others fired four shots, three shots and one shot apiece, the police said.
But it is the total number of shots that shook and angered the families of the men and community leaders. "How many shots?" Mr. Sharpton asked yesterday, over and over, in a chant at a rally in a park near Mary Immaculate Hospital, where the wounded men were being treated. The crowd called back, "Fifty!"
Statistically, the shooting is an aberration. The number of shots fired per officer who acted in the 112 shooting incidents this year, through Nov. 19, is 3.2, said Paul J. Browne, a department spokesman. Last year, that number was 3.7 shots fired per officer in 109 incidents. They are down from 4.6 in 2000 and 5.0 in 1995.
But shootings with high numbers of shots fired, however rare, call to mind dark events of the city's past, like the 1999 killing of Gidone Busch, who was clutching a hammer when officers fired 12 times, and, most notably, the shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant who died in a hail of 41 bullets, also in 1999.
In the 1995 Bronx bodega robbery in which officers fired 125 shots, the suspects did not fire back. "They were shooting to the echo of their own gunfire," a former police official said at the time.
The shooting on Saturday unfolded in a flash. An undercover officer posted inside the Club Kalua, a site of frequent drug, weapon and prostitution complaints in Jamaica, overheard an exchange between a stripper and a man that led the officer to suspect the man was armed, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said on Saturday. The undercover officer alerted the officers acting as backup outside - there were seven officers in all - about 4 a.m., setting into motion the events to follow later.
Eight men left the club and argued briefly with another man, with one from the group saying, "Yo, get my gun," Mr. Kelly said.
The eight men apparently split into two groups of four, with one group piling into a Nissan Altima driven by Mr. Bell, Commissioner Kelly said. As an undercover detective who had been following the group on foot approached the vehicle, Mr. Bell drove into him, striking his leg, before plowing into a minivan carrying two backup officers, the commissioner said.
The Altima reversed, mounting a sidewalk and hitting the lowered gate of a building before going forward and striking the van again. The officers opened fire, striking Mr. Bell, 23, twice, in the right arm and neck, Commissioner Kelly said. The critically wounded man, Joseph Guzman, 31, was struck 11 times, and the third man, Trent Benefield, 23, three times. Mr. Kelly said it was unclear whether there was a fourth man in the car and what became of him.
A person familiar with the case who knows the detectives' version of events said yesterday that it was Mr. Guzman who asked for his gun, and that the first undercover detective on foot clearly identified himself to the occupants of the car and, gun drawn, told them to get out. Instead, the person said, they roared toward him. That detective fired the first shot.
In the ensuing barrage, one shot struck the window of a house, another a window at an AirTrain platform, injuring two Port Authority police officers with flying glass. It appeared that the Altima was struck by 21 shots, fewer than half of the number fired, the police said.
The whole thing most likely took less than a minute. The officer who fired 31 times could have done so in fewer than 20 seconds, with the act of reloading taking less than one second, Mr. Cerar said. The 49 shots that followed the undercover detective's first may have been contagious shooting, said one former police official who insisted on anonymity because the investigation is continuing.
"He shoots, and you shoot, and the assumption is he has a good reason for shooting. You saw it in Diallo. You see it in a lot of shootings," the official said. "You just chime in. I don't mean the term loosely. But you see your partner, and your reflexes take over."
The phenomenon of officers' firing dozens of shots at a time dates back in part to 1993 and the department's switch from six-shot .38-caliber revolvers, cumbersome to reload, to semiautomatic pistols that hold 15 rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. The change, like any of its magnitude, followed years of studies and differences of opinion, and finally came into effect after the 1986 murder of a police officer, Scott Gadell, who was reloading his six-shooter when he was fatally shot.
Commissioner Kelly, during his first term in the office, in 1992 and 1993, ordered a switch to semiautomatics, but ordered the clips modified to hold only 10 rounds. That modification was later undone, prompting him, after Mr. Diallo's shooting six years later, to speculate in a New York Times op-ed article, "Now may be the time to re-impose it and to intensify training that teaches police officers to hold their fire until they know why they are shooting."
Eugene O'Donnell, a professor of police studies at John Jay College, said a high number of shots fired underscores the threat the officers felt.
"The only reason to be shooting in New York City is that you or someone else is going to be killed and it's going to be imminent," he said. "It's highly unlikely you fire a shot or two shots. You fire as many shots as you have to, to extinguish the threat. You don't fire one round and say: 'Did I hit him? Is he hit?' "
Mr. Cerar said, "Until we have some substitute for a firearm, there will always be a situation where more rounds are fired than in other situations."
William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2006

10 November 2006
RUMSFELD - THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT LISTEN
By Christopher Hitchens
IS IT only five years since the society columns in Washington were describing Donald Rumsfeld as “hot”, and printing stories about how ladies of a certain age wanted his phone number?
The aplomb he displayed during the campaign in Afghanistan, and the way he seemed to enjoy his press conferences, were just the tonic that the country appeared to need after the humiliation and panic of 11 September.
It didn’t hurt that the Secretary of Defence had been seen in his shirt-sleeves, helping direct rescue operations after a plane ploughed into the Pentagon.
As the Taliban fled and Afghans greeted American soldiers as liberators, the escape of Osama bin-Laden was a detail that could be taken care of later, and “Rummy” seemed able to do no wrong.
By this month, it seemed not only that he could do nothing right, but that everything that had gone wrong was his fault.
Surveying the hell that is today’s Baghdad, who can avoid wincing at his offhand remark that “stuff happens?” The situation would be just as bad if he had not said that, but his breezy refusal to face facts had come to symbolize an Administration that did not learn from its mistakes.
Or from its crimes – the horrors of Abu Ghreib and the lawlessness of Guantanamo and “extraordinary rendition” also became associated with a Rumsfeldian smile that began to look more like an irritating smirk than a confident grin.
He once told me that he was the only man in Washington who was still doing the same job as he was doing 30 years ago (he was at the Pentagon under President Ford) and that cadets whose graduation he had once attended were now wearing four stars. This ought perhaps to have led him to “bond” better with the soldiers under his command, but the fact is that his subordinates came to resent him.
Stories emerged from the office about his reluctance to listen, about his outbursts of bad temper, and about the now-legendary “snowflakes” – the blizzard of memos with which he showered the building. Rumsfeld is essentially a businessman, and many CEOs have the fond illusion that government departments, and even wars in faraway countries, can be run in the same way as a firm.
It is already obvious that his plan for a leaner and more streamlined military will enter the history books as a calamitous refusal to deploy enough troops to stay any possible course in Iraq.
One does not get a second chance to make a good first impression, and it now looks as if almost everything that went wrong in Iraq went wrong right from the start. This might possibly have been forgivable or correctable, but the continuing under-estimation of the insurgency (and the wave of the hand with which the Iraqi army was dismissed) will always be remembered, as will the complaints from serving soldiers that they were not issued with things – such as body-armour – which a thoughtful chief executive might have been expected to have provided for them.
Much is made of Rumsfeld’s earlier career as a wrestler: a sport in which pinning is all and compromise superfluous. These qualities could actually be very useful in wartime, but not if the original strategy is mistaken. A good wrestler is supposed to be able to use the opponent’s strength against him: something the United States has experienced in reverse in Iraq.
The last time I attended a Rumsfeld briefing, I got a slight glimpse of the problem.
To every question or suggestion or criticism, he responded as if it was a brilliant idea that exactly confirmed what he had just been saying. After a while, this stopped being curious and became slightly alarming. The Secretary of Defence, it occurred to me, had plenty of body-armour but it was protecting him from seeing or hearing anything that he didn’t like.
This is a quality that can get you a long way – including a very long way in the wrong direction.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair
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Disgraced Haggard: I am a "deceiver and a liar"
By Eric GorskiDenver Post Staff Writer DenverPost.com
In a letter of apology read to the congregation of New Life Church Sunday morning, Ted Haggard confessed to sexual immorality and described himself as "a deceiver and a liar."
"There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life," Haggard wrote.
Describing a lifelong battle against temptations that were contrary to his teachings, Haggard said he had sought assistance "in a variety of ways," and while he had stretches of "freedom," nothing proved effective.
Haggard was fired as senior pastor of the church on Saturday by an oversight board of pastors that concluded Haggard committed "sexually immoral conduct." The board had investigated claims by a male prostitute who said publicly this week that Haggard paid him for sex and took methamphetamine over a three-year period.
"The accusations that have been leveled against me are not all true, but enough of them are true that I have been appropriately and lovingly removed from ministry," Haggard wrote.
Haggard asked the congregation of the church he founded 26 years ago to forgive him. He also told church members not to be angry at his accuser, instead urging them to thank God for him.
"He didn't violate you; I did," Haggard said.
While the letter was read, more than 7,000 people in attendance sat in silence, some of them weeping. The letter was read by Larry Stockstill, who leads a church outside Baton Rouge, La., that is considered the "mother church of New Life."
After the letter was read, there was brief applause with a smattering of people standing.
In deciding to dismiss Haggard, the oversight board consulted with several evangelical leaders, including James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Jack Hayford, a prominent preacher from southern California, Stockstill said.
Stockstill tried to reassure church members their institution was safe and secure, despite Haggard's removal as leader. The decision to dismiss Haggard, rather than discipline him, actually came as a relief to "Pastor Ted" and his wife, Stockstill said.
"That is not a harsh thing, that's a wonderful thing for him," Stockstill said.
In his letter, Haggard said he added to the confusion this week when speaking to reporters about the allegations against him. He acknowledged "inconsistent statements" for which he was solely responsible.
"The fact is, I am guilty of sexual immorality, and I take responsibility for the entire problem," he wrote.
Haggard said he and his wife, Gayle, "need to be gone for a while," and will never return to a leadership role at New Life Church.
Gayle Haggard also released a letter to the congregation. In it, she professed her commitment to her marriage and her belief in the teachings of the church.
"I would not change one iota of what I have been teaching the women of our church," Gayle Haggard wrote. "For those of you who have been concerned that my marriage was so perfect I could not possibly relate to the women who are facing great difficulties, know that this will never again be the case.
"My test has begun; watch me. I will try to prove myself faithful."

Evangelical ousted amid gay sex scandal

KIM NGUYENAssociated Press
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - The Rev. Ted Haggard was dismissed Saturday as leader of the megachurch he founded after a board determined the influential evangelist had committed "sexually immoral conduct," the church said.
Haggard had resigned two days earlier as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, where he held sway in Washington and condemned homosexuality, after a Denver man named Mike Jones claimed to have had drug-fueled trysts with him. He also had placed himself on administrative leave from the New Life Church, but its Overseer Board took the stronger action Saturday.
"Our investigation and Pastor Haggard's public statements have proven without a doubt that he has committed sexually immoral conduct," the independent board said in a statement.
Haggard was "informed of this decision," the statement said, and he "agreed as well that he should be dismissed."
Haggard, 50, on Friday acknowledged paying Jones for a massage and for methamphetamine, but said he did not have sex with him and did not take the drug.
The statement from the 14,000-member church said the investigation would continue to determine the extent of the misconduct. The Rev. Mike Ware of Victory Church in Westminster, a member of the board, declined to characterize what investigators found but said the board did not talk to Jones.
Haggard did not answer his home or mobile phones Saturday, and neither was accepting messages. The Rev. Rob Brendle, an associate pastor at New Life, said Haggard was out of town.
"We are fully confident in the board's judgment and decision," Brendle said. "Everyone supports Ted and his family. We stand by him."
Jones said the news of Haggard's dismissal made him sad.
"I feel really bad for his wife and family and his congregation. I know it's a sad day for them, too," Jones said. "I feel bad when someone has so many attachments to others. It affects everyone. I'm certainly not cheering or jumping up and down over what's happened.
"I just hope the family has peace and can come to terms with things. I hope they can continue with a happy life."
The Rev. Ross Parsley will lead the church until a permanent replacement for Haggard is chosen by the end of the year, the statement said. A letter explaining Haggard's removal and an apology from him will be read at Sunday services.
Haggard's situation is a disappointment to Christian conservatives, whom President Bush and other Republicans are courting heavily in the run-up to Tuesday's election.
Many were already disheartened with the president and the Republican-controlled Congress over their failure to deliver big gains on social issues even before the congressional page scandal involving former Rep. Mark Foley.
Haggard, who had been president of the evangelical association since 2003, has participated in conference calls with White House staffers and lobbied Congress last year on Supreme Court nominees.
Haggard visited the White House once or twice, Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto said Friday.
Richard Cizik, the evangelical association's vice president for governmental affairs, called Haggard's ouster "heartbreaking and unfortunate."
"He is a man who has done a lot of good and who hopefully after a period of repentance and counsel and spiritual restoration will have a future ministry at some point," Cizik said.
The association has named President Leith Anderson, senior pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minn., as its interim president.
The board's decision cuts Haggard off from leadership of the massive church he founded in the mid-1980s. He held New Life's first services in the unfinished basement of his Colorado Springs home.
Jones, who said he is gay, said he was upset when he discovered who Haggard was and found out that the New Life Church had publicly opposed same-sex marriage - a key issue in Colorado, with a pair of issues on Tuesday's ballot.
"It made me angry that here's someone preaching about gay marriage and going behind the scenes having gay sex," Jones said.
Jones has denied selling drugs but said Haggard snorted methamphetamine before their sexual encounters to heighten his experience. Jones agreed to take a lie-detector test Friday; the administrator of the test said the answers about his sex allegations "indicated deception."
But Jones said Saturday: "Obviously they determined there was sexual indiscretions, so I think that vindicates my claim."
Haggard told reporters he bought meth but never used it; he said he received a massage from Jones after being referred to him by a Denver hotel. Jones said that no hotel referred Haggard and that he advertises only in gay publications.
In a TV interview this week, Haggard said: "Never had a gay relationship with anybody, and I'm steady with my wife, I'm faithful to my wife."
Church member Christine Rayes, 47, said the congregation had hoped the allegations "were all lies."
"We all have to move forward now," she said. "This doesn't make what Ted accomplished here any less. The farther up you are, the more you are a target for Satan."

Key Evangelical quits amid gay sex claim
CATHERINE TSAI
Associated Press
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - The president of the National Association of Evangelicals, an outspoken opponent of gay marriage, has given up his post while a church panel investigates allegations he paid a man for sex.
The Rev. Ted Haggard resigned as president of the 30 million-member association Thursday after being accused of paying the man for monthly trysts over the past three years.
Haggard, a married father of five, denied the allegations, but also stepped aside as head of his 14,000-member New Life Church pending an investigation.
"I am voluntarily stepping aside from leadership so that the overseer process can be allowed to proceed with integrity," he said in a statement. "I hope to be able to discuss this matter in more detail at a later date. In the interim, I will seek both spiritual advice and guidance."
Carolyn Haggard, spokeswoman for the New Life Church and the pastor's niece, said a four-member church panel will investigate the allegations. The board has the authority to discipline Haggard, including removing him from ministry work.
The acting senior pastor at New Life, Ross Parsley, told KKTV-TV of Colorado Springs that Haggard admitted that some of the accusations were true.
"I just know that there has been some admission of indiscretion, not admission to all of the material that has been discussed but there is an admission of some guilt," Parsley told the station.
He did not elaborate, and a telephone number for Parsley could not be found late Thursday.
The allegations come as voters in Colorado and seven other states get ready to decide Tuesday on amendments banning gay marriage. Besides the proposed ban on the Colorado ballot, a separate measure would establish the legality of domestic partnerships providing same-sex couples with many of the rights of married couples.
The allegations stunned church members.
"It's political, right before the elections," said Brian Boals, a New Life member for 17 years.
Church member E.J. Cox, 25, called the claims "ridiculous."
"People are always saying stuff about Pastor Ted," she said. "You just sort of blow it off. He's just like anyone else in the public eye."
The accusations were made by Mike Jones, 49, of Denver, who said he decided to go public because of the political fight over the amendments.
"I just want people to step back and take a look and say, 'Look, we're all sinners, we all have faults, but if two people want to get married, just let them, and let them have a happy life,'" said Jones, who added that he isn't working for any political group.
Jones, who said he is gay, said he was also upset when he discovered Haggard and the New Life Church had publicly opposed same-sex marriage.
"It made me angry that here's someone preaching about gay marriage and going behind the scenes having gay sex," he said.
Jones claimed Haggard paid him to have sex nearly every month over three years. He said he advertised himself as an escort on the Internet and was contacted by a man who called himself Art, who snorted methamphetamine before their sexual encounters to heighten his experience.
Jones said he later saw the man on television identified as Haggard and that the two last had sex in August.
He said he has voice mail messages from Haggard, as well as an envelope he said Haggard used to mail him cash. He declined to make the voice mails available to the AP, but KUSA-TV reported what it said were excerpts late Thursday that referred to methamphetamine.
"Hi Mike, this is Art," one call began, according to the station. "Hey, I was just calling to see if we could get any more. Either $100 or $200 supply."
A second message, left a few hours later, began: "Hi Mike, this is Art, I am here in Denver and sorry that I missed you. But as I said, if you want to go ahead and get the stuff, then that would be great. And I'll get it sometime next week or the week after or whenever."
Haggard, 50, was appointed president of the evangelicals association in March 2003. He has participated in conservative Christian leaders' conference calls with White House staffers and lobbied members of Congress last year on U.S. Supreme Court appointees after Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement.
After Massachusetts legalized gay marriage in 2004, Haggard and others began organizing state-by-state opposition. Last year, Haggard and officials from the nearby Christian ministry Focus on the Family announced plans to push Colorado's gay marriage ban for the 2006 ballot.
At the time, Haggard said that he believed marriage is a union between a man and woman rooted in centuries of tradition, and that research shows it's the best family unit for children.
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Associated Press Writer Dan Elliott contributed to this report from Denver.

Last of the apartheid-era hardliners, the 'Great Crocodile' of Afrikaner politics who arguably destroyed the National Party
P. W. BOTHA, the eighth Prime Minister and the first State President of South Africa, was a contradictory figure. Although he admitted that the apartheid state “must adapt or die” and introduced constitutional reforms that brought Coloured and Asian representation into Parliament and the Cabinet, he also ignored the demands of Africans and supervised the brutal crackdown on violent anti-apartheid unrest that had threatened to render South Africa ungovernable. He famously wagged his finger in 1985 during the Rubicon speech, declaring to the opponents as well as to the friends of apartheid South Africa: “Don’t push us too far.”
Nevertheless, history may well judge that P. W. Botha rather than F. W. de Klerk destroyed the unity of the National Party (NP) that had ruled South Africa since 1948. The Groot Krokodil (Great Crocodile) of Afrikaner politics dominated the defence of the nation for 23 years from his appointment as Minister of Defence in 1966 to his retirement in 1989.
Pieter Willem Botha was born in the Orange Free State in 1916. He studied law at Grey University College, later the University of the Orange Free State, leaving without a degree. He quickly became active in National Party politics in the Cape. Legend has it that as a 20-year-old political organiser he broke up United Party meetings while sitting astride a horse. In 1939, he joined the Ossewabrandwag, the extremist paramilitary organisation that supported Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Botha avoided internment when he broke away from the organisation, accusing it of meddling in National Party affairs. After the war his political rise continued: in 1948, after the NP victory over Jan Smuts’s United Party, P. W., Secretary of the Cape National Party, was elected as an MP for the Cape constituency of George.
In 1958 Hendrik Verwoerd,apartheid’s visionary leader, appointed Botha Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, and in 1961 he entered the Cabinet as Minister of Community Development and Coloured Affairs.
In April 1966, five months before Verwoerd’s assassination, Botha became Minister of Defence. In the same year, he was elected leader of the National Party in the Cape. Helen Suzman recalled in her memoir Botha’s vicious reaction to the murder of the Prime Minister. He screamed across the chamber: “It’s you who did this. It’s all you liberals. You incite people. Now we will get you. We will get the lot of you.”
Between 1966 and 1978, Botha built strong power bases in the Cape and the South African military. Despite the embarrassment of presiding over South Africa’s intervention in Angola in 1975 and rapid withdrawal in 1976, Botha was at the centre of a maelstrom of theory and planning in the mid-1970s.
In 1975, launching the Defence White Paper, he declared: “Defence strategy embraces much more than military strategy. It involves economy, ideology, technology, and even social matters and can therefore only be meaningful and valid if proper account is taken of all these other spheres . . . This, in fact, is the meaning of Total Strategy.” During the 1980s, the Total Strategy would lead to “securicrats”, as the security officials became known, interfering in almost every aspect of South African society in a flailing attempt to avoid the collapse of apartheid. At the end of 1976, Botha chaired a special Cabinet Commitee investigating the possibility of constutional change. His report in 1977 recommended an elected executive presidency and separate parliaments for Whites, Coloureds and Asians.
P. W. Botha was elected Prime Minister of South Africa in 1978 during the Information scandal (also known as Muldergate) that eventually destroyed the careers and reputations of Prime Minister John Vorster, the most likely successor, Connie Mulder; Hendrik van den Bergh,the head of Boss, the South African Secret Service; and Eschel Rhoodie, the Secretary of Information. After a closely fought leadership campaign, which opponents likened to a military coup, Botha came to power as the head of a divided NP. Profound tensions existed between the verkramptes, who wanted a return to the rigidly doctrinaire application of apartheid. and the verligtes, who believed that the ideology should be adapted to suit changing circumstances. Botha was numbered among the verligtes despite his muscular image as Minister of Defence. The ideological differences proved intractable and in March 1982 Dr Andries Treurnicht, the leader of the Transvaal NP, established the Conservative Party with 16 MPs. The broedertwis (brotherly conflict) had been exacerbated by Botha’s proposals to allow Coloured and Asian representation in a tricameral Parliament.
Botha rewarded the South African Defence Force (SADF) with a posioned chalice. While the defence budget grew exponentially during both his period as Defence Minister and later as Prime Minister/President, he also expected the military to become involved in South African politics. Preaching “hearts and minds” while waging war at home and in neighbouring countries was never likely to be a recipe for success. Meanwhile, the Military Intelligence Division dominated South Africa’ s international intelligence gathering. For every success such as the meeting with Margaret Thatcher at Chequers in 1984 or the Nkomati Accord (of the same year) under which Mozambique agreed not to allow the African National Congress to operate from its territory and the South Africans undertook to withdraw support for Renamo, there was a multitude of brutal interventions in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Lestotho, Botswana and Angola which achieved little. Nicknamed Piet Wapens (Weapons) by NP colleagues during his tenure as Minister of Defence, Botha’s enemies in the Department of Information called him Pangaman (Macheteman), “because you never knew when he was going to lash out at you”.
His standing as a reformist leader at home and abroad disintegrated as the violence, that erupted in the African townships in late 1984 spread throughout the country. In July 1985, Botha declared a partial state of emergency, which in June 1986 was extended to a full state of emergency. As the South African economy collapsed after the Chase Manhattan Bank’s refusal to roll over its loans and the rand lost half its value against sterling, it became obvious to informed observers that the apartheid state would be forced to negotiate with the African opposition. Botha refused to lift the bans on the major African political organisations, the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress, and insisted that they must renounce violence before there could be any question of negotiation or the release of Nelson Mandela and his colleagues.
In addition to the brutal police action that was required to control the insurrection in the townships, the Government instituted press censorship and large-scale detention without trial. Tens of thousands of people were subjected to the full brunt of apartheid justice. Meanwhile, apartheid death squads targeted individuals. One State Security Council document, later discovered by Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) researchers revealed that in July 1985: “The chairman (Botha) points out that he is convinced that the brain behind the unrest situation is situated inside South Africa, and that it must be found and destroyed.”
In May 1986 a delegation of Commonwealth notables, known as the Eminent Persons’ Group, visited South Africa, hoping to facilitate negotiation. The group left South Africa without meeting the President, however, amid rumours of a split between doves and hawks in the Cabinet. While the group was still in Cape Town, the SADF launched raids on neighbouring Commonwealth states. Within months, the United States passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act and sanctions packages were also adopted by Britain, the Commonwealth and the European Community.
Towards the end of 1987 it became clear that Botha was facing critical choices in his regional policy. The SADF, which had invaded Angola on numerous occasions during the 1980s to bolster Jonas Savimbi’s Unita against the Cuban-supported Angolan MPLA government, reached an impasse at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale. Realising that sanctions had finally had their effect (South Africa had lost air superiority) and that the SADF was risking the loss of many white soldiers, Botha opted for peace, reportedly on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis. Under pressure from both the United States and the Soviet Union, South Africa and Angola sought a diplomatic resolution to the Angolan war.
Botha has rarely received praise for his attempts to reform apartheid but it was under his leadership that the South African state abolished the pass laws which restricted the movement of Africans in the country, legalised interracial marriages, and gave the nod to the formation of black trade unions. But he remained contradictory until the end: in February 1988, seventeen anti-apartheid organisations were banned. Three months later, the first formal meetings between the imprisoned Mandela and a government team of negotiators started in Pollsmoor prison.
On 18 January, 1989, Botha suffered a mild stroke and was advised by his doctors to rest for six weeks. Members of his family insist to this day that he was poisoned by a member of his own Cabinet. A few weeks later Botha took the country, and even his closest colleagues, by surprise when he sent a message to the National Party’s parliamentary caucus announcing that he ws resigning as party leader. He intended, however, to retain his position as State President. It was a situation designed for disaster and following the election of F. W. de Klerk, the NP voted in favour of the leader of the party occupying the office of the State President. Botha grudgingly accepted that he would retire after the general election in September 1989 but after a five-month sulk, he appeared on South African television to announce that, since he was being ignored by his Cabinet, he had no choice but to resign. In the midst of this extraordinary interregnum, Botha met Mandela. The two leaders claimed to like each other, Botha later commenting that he believed that Mandela was a communist but he respected him as a gentleman and a Xhosa chief.
Botha retired to the aptly named Wilderness near his former constituency of George. He rarely granted interviews and managed to avoid facing the consequences of his actions in power.
Pieter Willem Botha, first State President of South Africa, 1984-1989, was born on January 12, 1916. He died on October 31, 2006, aged 90