Let's Be Very Clear: Ted Haggard is a Zero on the Kinsey Scale

From the New York Times:

One of four ministers who oversaw three weeks of intensive counseling for the Rev. Ted Haggard said the disgraced minister emerged convinced that he is ''completely heterosexual.''

So is he really a 0 on the Kinsey scale, or at most a 1? Does the fact that Haggard admits to only one same-sex experience mean that he is "completely heterosexual," or does it mean only that he has lacked opportunities?

For reasons I've explained elsewhere, I think this is the continuation of a very sad story. Obviously, Haggard and his associates can declare him to be anything they like. What makes the story sad is the use of the term "completely". It is clearly very important to the ministers-- and to Haggard himself-- that he not have any speck of homosexual desire, for to have any such desire, no matter how small, would be polluting. It is, sad to say, all too similar to the Jim Crow theory that one drop of black blood made you black and therefore socially inferior to "pure" whites.

The Kinsey scale, whatever its limitations, was premised on the assumption that sexual orientation in human populations is not a matter of either opposite-sex or same-sex, or of healthy desires and polluted ones; rather it involves a continuum of possible orientations that are spread across a population distribution-- as are so many other human traits. What Haggard and his friends particularly want to deny is this fact, because it changes the meaning of normalcy and undermines their way of seeing the world.