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The overseers also corrected widespread reports that Haggard had been "cured."

"There should be no confusion that deliverance from habitual, life-controlling problems is a journey and not an event," Stockstill said. "Ted will need years of accountability to demonstrate his victory over both actions and tendencies."

Another overseer, Tim Ralph, earlier said Haggard was "completely heterosexual." What he had meant to say, Ralph explained, was that Haggard "received a lot of good tools and wisdom to embrace completely the heterosexual man he is. We all know he has some problems. He's on the road to recovery."

As for the current church leadership, the overseers said, "We have found a few staff members struggling with unrelated sin issues. Each such person has been confronted and has submitted to discipline. To our relief, we are finding no culture of immorality among the staff here as we might have initially expected."

If you haven't read it, be sure to read Patton Dodd's Beliefnet essay, "We Are Completely Sexual," which rightly corrects a lot of the "reactionary and unfair" punditry regarding Haggard's orientation.

4. What's "surprising" about it?
One of the worst headlines of the week appeared in The Washington Post: "Surprising Unity on Va. Hospital Visit Bill: Conservatives Support Right That Includes Gays."

The bill lets hospital patients choose their visitors—even those of the same sex. And it's surprising that conservatives would back this? Only for those who think that conservatives are heartless bigots. The Post writer assumes that support for Virginia's marriage amendment would mean opposition to this bill. But religious conservatives have long supported hospital visitation rights (and bereavement leave) and have said that bills precisely like this are a much better solution than redefining marriage. Has anyone been paying attention?

5. "Darwinists" against Darwin
"Was Darwin Wrong?" asked the cover of the November 2004 National Geographic. Inside, David Quammen's article began with a word in massive type: "No."

That word is omitted in the online version of the story, and with good reason. Darwin was wrong. And it's evolutionists who say so. Among them: Ulrich Kutschera, one of Germany's preeminent evolutionary biologists and a widely quoted critic of Intelligent Design. "It must be made clear that the modern theory of evolution is in part anti-Darwin," he said in an American Association for the Advancement of Science speech earlier this month. "Darwin did not, for instance, take into account the principle of evolution by cooperation."

Scientists, he said, should "no longer talk about Darwinism. You could say that Darwinism is one man's outdated ideology of the 19th century. And Darwinism sounds like Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism. That's a problem."

Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, agrees, telling MSNBC, "Geologists don't refer to themselves as Lyellists. Physicists don't refer to themselves as Kelvinists. We don't refer to ourselves by our 19th-century representative. The science has grown up."

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February (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51