Of Burkhas and Pastors

I ran into trouble this morning after I tried to read more about the outing of Ted Haggard, a Bush confidant and evangelical gay bating pastor. Haggard scares me because he is part of a community of right wing evangelicals that envelope the US Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs. The same Air Force Academy that last year admitted to its officers' efforts to indoctrinate Jews into Jesus worship.

The problem? Google gave me too many hits. I began coming upon other news stories about fundamentalists in trouble over sex. I began to wonder, are fundamentalist Christtians obsessed with sex? Then I ran into this post from the personal blog of Marc Driscoll, a fundamentalist Christian pastor in Seattle:

....I started the church ten years ago when I was twenty-five years of age. Thankfully, I was married to a beautiful woman. I met my lovely wife Grace when we were seventeen, married her at twenty-one, and by God’s grace have been faithful to her in every way since the day we met. I have, however, seen some very overt opportunities for sin. On one occasion I actually had a young woman put a note into my shirt pocket while I was serving communion with my wife, asking me to have dinner, a massage, and sex with her. On another occasion a young woman emailed me a photo of herself topless and wanted to know if I liked her body. Thankfully, that email was intercepted by an assistant and never got to me.

....I would like to share some practical suggestions for fellow Christian leaders, especially young men:

• Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. .... It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.
  

• Every pastor needs a pastor. Too often the pastor is seen as a sort of little God and his wife as some glorified First Lady. Every pastor needs a pastor with whom he can regularly have accountability and the confession of sin. Every pastor’s wife also needs a godly woman chosen for her maturity and trustworthiness.
• ... There is no reason a pastor should be sitting alone at the church at odd hours (e.g., early morning and late evening) to study when anyone can drop in for any reason and have access to him. .......Some years ago I found that lonely people, some of them hurting single moms wanting a strong man to speak into their life, would show up to hang out and catch time with me. It was shortly thereafter that I brought my books home and purchased a laptop and cell phone so that I was not tied to the church office.
• (if) a flirtatious woman shows up to a Bible study at the pastor’s home, the pastor and his family have the right to request that they never return.
• ..... Too often the pastor’s assistant is a woman who, if not sexually involved, becomes too emotionally involved with the pastor as a sort of emotional and practical second wife. I have been blessed with a trustworthy heterosexual male assistant who can travel with me, meet with me, etc., without the fear of any temptations ........
• Pastors must speak freely and frankly with their wives about their temptations. Without this there really can be no walking in the light and sin always grows in darkness.
• Pastors must not travel alone; the anonymity and fatigue of the road is too great a temptation for many men.
  

In conclusion, I say none of this as moralism.

The reader can judge for themselves but for me, this sounds like the stuff of a very serious mental illness. Mr. Driscoll sounds really obsessed. Is he also frightened of men? I wonder if this sort of fear motivates men in Saudi Arabia to enforce the burkha? And how does such thinking effect sex itself? After a day in the company of males and burkha-ed females, does the Saudi Prince come home to perfumed flesh?

I am personally sexually conservative, I believe that heterosexual sex is normative and see no reason to have a public debate about other forms of play in bed. To me, most fo this is a private affair. But, how can the same people who consider homosexuality a sin worthy of electing G. Bush as President and NOT see the illness implicit in Marc Driscoll's writings?