I have already confessed to loving it when hypocrites get busted. John Ensign? Ted Haggard? Mark Sanford? David Vitter? I practically danced with schadenfreude when their good Christian family values dissolved into a sticky mess of gay sex, adultery, prostitution and other “perversions.” And when addict Rush Limbaugh copped to buying black market opiates after ranting that too many white people were using drugs and the police should “go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river, too?” That was awesome.
But I actually agreed with Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan yesterday when he decried the outing of a Minneapolis anti-gay minister who was exposed after attending a 12-step meeting for gay men “struggling with chastity.” Like all 12-step meetings, participants were guaranteed anonymity. The title of Nolan’s post was Infiltrating 12-Step Meetings Is Evil.
Would I have approved of a reporter busting Rush Limbaugh by sitting in on a Narcotics Anonymous meeting? No. Anonymity is sacrosanct in any 12-step program; anything that breaches that trust threatens the sobriety and recovery of others. If you attend such a meeting, you know this. If you’re a reporter who attends such a meeting with the purpose of exposing the people there, you’re an asshole. In this case, Nolan wrote that “The ends don’t justify the means.”
Of course, this was Catholic Church-sponsored 12-step program to help gay people live chaste lives. Not exactly the same, to my mind, as the AA and NA meetings that have helped so many people cope with alcohol and drug addiction. But it’s still a place where this man thought he’d be safe and anonymous. He wasn’t caught with his pants down at a pride parade or a gay bar. He was outed when he sought help—or at least, the kind of help he thought he needed. My frisson of schadenfreude faded quickly.
People who want to be in the closet have the right to be in the closet, and people who want help remaining celibate should be allowed to do so without being exposed. If you’re George Rekers and you travel around with an escort you hired from rentboy.com, you’re in public; you lose the expectation of privacy. Same goes for Larry Craig trying to pick up men in a public restroom.
But the gay man being exposed in this case was not caught doing something sexual, rather, he was trying extremely hard not to do something sexual and he was desperately trying to keep it private. Essentially, he was trying to practice what he preaches. It’s a small distinction, I’ll grant you, but I think it makes him less of a hypocrite and and more of a sad closet case. I have a certain amount of compassion towards people who are so obviously tormented.
The Gawker commentariat was (typically) harsh, both towards the reporter for outing the minister and towards the minister himself for being an anti-gay gay man. Said one:
The bottom line is that if a reader of this article needs to attend a 12 Step for any reason whatsoever, and decides NOT TO because they are worried about their anonymity, then this [magazine] article is a big fucking fail.
That would be my concern. I’m a big fan of 12-step programs—the Sharper family is quite well-represented in AA and NA—and if they weren’t anonymous, they would be a lot less effective. Still, I don’t entirely disagree with the commenter who said:
Treating homosexuality as an addiction to be overcome is horrifying; destroying such groups by infiltration and exposure is a good act. Slime like [him] who spend their lives attempting to destroy the lives and rights of gay people to assuage their own self-hatred deserve to be exposed by any and all legal means.
Of course, Hamilton Nolan just posted this story with all the links and identifications intact, so while he may think the outing is reprehensible…he just doubled down on it, as one commenter pointed out:
So congratulations, while bitching about the damage outing someone in a despicable way has done from a magazine so small I’ve never even heard of as a gay man, you’ve taken that information and continued to pass it on to millions. Who do you think hurt his anonymity more?
It’s a fair point. I’ll throw this open to you, gentle readers. Did the journalist act unethically? Did Hamilton Nolan? Does this minister have the right to hide his homosexuality while publically attacking the homosexuality of others? Do even hypocrites deserve compassion?
Oh how complicated.
Well here’s my take as a journalist.
1. The original journalist was entirely unethical. Not least because the story wasn’t news and while the minister might be despicable he has a right to privacy. That story was muckraking pure and simple.
2. Nolan is on mildly dodgy territory but no more so then when the Guardian and The New York Times tut over tabloid stories or celeb scandals and then reprint them. It’s pretty standard practice and certainly not as bad as the original story.
3. Complicated – probably not but I feel that the minister is a self-loathing closet case who has problems – as mentioned it’s not as though he was hanging out having sex with men every night and then preaching hell fire by day. He has a complicated issue with his sexuality and I’m sure his homophobia is driven by an inability to deal with his own sexual leanings.
Does that make him a hypocrite – I’m not sure, I feel that its more complex than that. In many ways this whole thing reminds me of Peter Tatchall and the campaign to out closeted gay men in England – I understand Tatchall’s anger and he’s right in many ways but I can’t help feel that people have a right to come to terms with their own sexuality and out themselves.
I think the commentator on Gawker who argued for the exposure of such men as the minister makes a really good point but, but, I don’t know something in me balks at it in this case because while the minister is an unpleasant man I feel he’s not so much a hypocrite so much as someone who needs to seek help and come to terms with his issues.
Which sounds wishy washy I know but ultimately I do think that even hypocrites deserve some compassion.
Of course each of the cases you refer to is different, but I’d have to say that outing a guy after surreptitiously infiltrating a private 12-step type meeting is pretty sleazy. That being said, I’m not sure I feel much sympathy for anyone who goes around gay bashing people in public when they themselves are gay.
Did the journalist act unethically? Did Hamilton Nolan? Does this minister have the right to hide his homosexuality while publically attacking the homosexuality of others? Do even hypocrites deserve compassion?
The original journalist was beyond unethical. Outing someone by using a twelve-step program is so wrong that I’ll get on board with calling it evil. Hamilton Nolan was on ethically shaky ground, but honestly the papers in this minister’s hometown surely would have picked up the story anyway, so I’m not sure how much worse it makes it for the guy in question. And really anytime a larger publication criticizes the actions of a smaller publication they’ll run into this quandary, so I think we have to err on the side of exposing the harm or it will lead to a situation where the smaller publication can’t be shamed on a broader scale.
Before I answer the second question, I’d like to make it very clear that I disagree with the idea that homosexuality is a sin, or wrong, or objectionable in any way. But I think that the minister absolutely has the right to preach that it is a sin while attending these meetings, because the two actions are completely compatible. Many religious types believe that the act of homosexuality is a sin, but not being a homosexual. In that way, it’s like the idea that drinking to excess is wrong, but not being an alcoholic. The act is the sin, the state of being is the person’s cross to bear. This is why many of these groups welcome people who attend “Pray the Gay Away” type camps/ seminars and come out “straight”: they’re people with a serious temptation to sin that are valiantly fighting it and trying to walk the path that they believe God requires of them. I don’t agree with this, but I don’t see how it’s even slightly hypocritical. Would it be *more* admirable if the preacher had “confessed” his perceived weakness to his congregation and shared his struggle? Maybe yes, maybe no. But the true problem with this guy is his beliefs, not the way he was acting on them.
So I don’t believe that this guy is a hypocrite, but in general on the last question I say yes. I have compassion for hypocrites like I have compassion for all people. Should that compassion mean they get a free pass for harmful actions? Nope. I can feel badly for what Ted Haggard the person is going through while still believing that Ted Haggard the public figure needed to be exposed to mitigate the damage done by his intolerant message.
Wasn’t there some other way to bust this guy? If he’s going to a 12 step program, chances are very good that sooner or later he would fall off the wagon and go go a gay bar or cruise the park or whatever. I agree with Becky that violating the privacy of all the other participants just to get a story about this man of God was a lousy thing to do. Nowadays these guys can’t hide as well as they used to-it was just a matter of time for him.
The argument can be made that if we wrote exposes (I don’t know how to put in an accent-sorry!)about every clergyperson who preached one thing and did another, the press would have no room for anything else. But I have a particular loathing for closet cases like this who have the power either to keep silent on the subject or to make life even more difficult for people like themselves, and choose the latter. I’m all for outing the guy if he uses his pulpit to inflict his hypocrisy and self-loathing on his congregation-but not at the price of damaging innocent people who had the misfortune to be in the same room with him at a meeting that was advertised to be safe.
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@mischiefmanager,
I agree that there were probably some better ways of exposing this guy as the whackjob he is. He is after all, the same pastor who wrote a blog post about how the tornado that hit Minneapolis (10 blocks from my apt!) last summer was God’s way of punishing the Lutheran church for being too open to gays. The steeple of the church where they were having a convention was damaged, so naturally Brock made the connection. Yup, that’s right. God sends tornados to punish all the gays!!!
Lavender magazine was definitely way out of line here, and I’ll definitely think twice about picking it up at the coffee shop from now on. Outing people against their will is not cool.
The original article could have worked better had the names and locations been altered; that would have preserved anonymity, but allowed a look inside the strange world of the anti-gay activist struggling with their own homosexuality. There’s nothing wrong with examining the phenomenon, as long as great lengths are gone to, to provide cover, so there is little fear of exposure. This is why I have a dim view of “journalism” nowadays, because responsibility to sources, scruples, and ethics appear to be endangered species in the world of “reporting.”
And while I might agree with Mr. Nolan, he fell into the same trap. He would have been better off not linking back to our using the original information, without taking precautions to maintain circumspection. So, in essence, Nolan is as big a hypocrite as the priest in the article.
This is why I do not frequent Gawker — between the pedantic and over-wrought commentary and the, frankly, weak articles, it’s not worth much of my time.
FYI…a followup from today’s Washington Post about what’s happened to the minister since the article broke:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/23/AR2010062304512.html?hpid=sec-religion
@BeckySharper: If the Lutheran Church he belongs to is willing to put up with him, so be it. That does not alter the tenor of the still-reprehensible article.
This whole escapade has done one thing: shown that churches cannot simply imbue clergy with unshakable values as part of their faith. No amount of divine holiness or prayer or belief keeps these men from being anything but men, men with conflicting desires and poor judgment. From pedophile priests, to anti-gay homosexual priests, to priests with lovers, it’s clear that no church is so powerful as to simply re-write the imperatives of a man.
@nn yes. Why do we have them at all, now?
I understand your agreement with this quote–I agree with this part:
“Treating homosexuality as an addiction to be overcome is horrifying…”
but not this:
“destroying such groups by infiltration and exposure is a good act.”
I support the exposure of hypocrites, but I don’t think that necessarily extends to the other people in the group. The people there who are struggling with themselves are not going to be helped by the exposure of them or their groups. In fact, I would expect that being publicly shamed would only cement in their minds, and the minds of those who heard about it, that being gay is bad.
@Clare: Yeah, that’s why I said I didn’t entirely disagree with it. You correctly picked out the part I did disagree with! I don’t think exposing anyone is going to help that person or the gay community/gay rights movement. To me it just seems personally cruel.
As a fellow proponent of anonymous groups, I agree with your disagreement (…) re: “destroying such groups by infiltration and exposure is a good act.”
No…no it’s not. There are tons of people who come to AA meetings and share their own personal take on AA (i.e. disagree with what other people hold as AA gospel), and tons of people who come to AA and don’t hear anything they like or want to use. Their solution is to walk away. Chastity Anonymous, or whatevs it was, is a voluntary group for people who believe they need to overcome something.
If they’re adhering to a “traditional” Anonymous 12-step format, the group won’t take part in any controversy, neither endorse nor oppose any causes etc, so it’s not like a journalist can claim they’re trying to uncover and dismantle a secret lobbying group.
The individual members may be anti-gay activists outside the rooms, but that’s their right and privilege as Americans. It is so appallingly frighteningly wrong – and sets such a scary precedent – to violate the anonymity of a group that to then slap your chest with pride (rhetoric-wise) because you’ve Righted a Wrong makes me feel ill.