“nine out of ten objective observers”

From Losers: The Road to Everyplace but the White House, 1996… Michael Lewis

As I stand in the front row of the morning service I can see Pastor Ted (Haggard) — between trips to the pulpit — glancing at me out of the corner of his eye.  I know what he is thinking.  He’s thinking he has a convert.  I haven’t even time to spare for the afternoon service, however.  It is Gay Pride Week in Colorado Springs.  (“I don’t understand it,” says Pastor Ted, when I explain why I am leaving.  “It would be like having Murderer’s Pride Day.”)  The parade begins an hour after the morning service ends, and though it is a bit of a hike from the New Life Church it seems worth the trouble.  There I am met by Frank Whitworth, the head of the local gay activist organization Ground Zero and this year’s parade marshal.  He is nearly twenty years older than Pastor Ted and about twenty degrees rounder.  If the two men were placed side by side, nine out of ten objective observers would say Pastor Ted was the gay activist and Whitworth the evangelical pastor.  That is unlikely to happen, however.  In a town of three hundred thousand in the middle of nowhere, the protagonists of a struggle that has attracted the attention of the world have never met.  Pastor Ted has made no more effort to meet Whitworth than Whitworth has to meet him.

 

Also of interest: the Charles E Collins for President contingency and the description of the “Taxpayers Party Convention” of 1996.

Leave a Reply