Earlier this month, a guest took the pulpit at Open Bible Fellowship in Morrison, Ill., a 350-member church surrounded by cornfields. The speaker was an insurance salesman from Colorado named Ted Haggard.

The former superstar pastor, disgraced two years ago in a sex-and-drugs scandal, had returned — this time as a Christian businessman preaching a message that was equal parts contrition and defiance. Haggard linked his fall to being molested in second grade and apologized again.

His two sermons were posted, fleetingly, on Haggard’s Web site under one word: “Alive!”

While his exact plans remain unclear, Haggard is unmistakably making himself a public figure again, nine months after his former church said he walked away from an oversight process meant to restore him.

The man who confessed to being a “a deceiver and a liar” is asking for another hearing, finding encouragement from a loyal circle of supporters, skepticism from those evangelical leaders who think it’s premature and complex emotions at the Colorado Springs church he betrayed.

Haggard, 52, resigned as president of the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals and was fired from New Life Church amid allegations that he paid a male prostitute for sex and used methamphetamine.

Haggard said in 2006 he bought the drugs but never used them, confessed to “sexual immorality” and described struggling with a “dark and repulsive” side. He had risen from preaching in his basement to taking part in White House conference calls — and fallen so far that he became a late-night punch line.

As part of a severance package with his former church, Haggard agreed to leave Colorado Springs for a period and not speak publicly about the scandal, church officials said at the time. But he never really disappeared, making news when he relocated his family to Arizona and solicited financial support in an e-mail.

Haggard’s plea for funds was rebuked by a three-pastor team overseeing his “restoration” — a healing process that doesn’t necessarily mean a public return. In February, New Life Church announced that Haggard had prematurely ended that relationship.

One restoration team member, H.B. London, said a return to vocational ministry in less than four or five years would be dangerous for Haggard, his family, former church and Colorado Springs.

“To sit on the sidelines for a person with that kind of personality and gifting is probably like being paralyzed,” said London, who counsels pastors through a division of Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs-based conservative Christian group. “If Mr. Haggard and others like him feel like they have a call from God, they rationalize that their behavior does not change that call.”

Haggard, who declined to be interviewed, is not the first fallen evangelical figure to agree to oversight and then balk. In the late 1980s, televangelist Jimmy Swaggart confessed to liaisons with a prostitute, begged forgiveness and submitted to the Assemblies of God, his denomination. Swaggart was ordered not to preach for a year, but resumed broadcasts after a few weeks and was defrocked.

Haggard’s support system includes Leo Godzich, who runs a Phoenix-based marriage ministry and said he met with Haggard at least once a week for more than a year. Godzich said Haggard remains committed to restoration, has paid a high price and still has much to offer.

“If all men are honest, all men are liars and deceivers,” Godzich said. “Once someone is gifted and called, that is something they generally cannot escape. They will be used in that regard again.”

“True redemption occurs when someone is fulfilling a destiny and purpose in their life.”

Haggard’s Nov. 2 return to the pulpit was set in motion by the Rev. Chris Byrd, a college classmate from Oral Roberts University. Byrd said he first invited Haggard to speak at his church last summer to offer the Haggard family support, help them heal and teach his own flock about sin and forgiveness.

By then, Haggard had moved his family back to Colorado Springs and was selling life insurance at their $700,000 home down the road from New Life Church, angering some who thought he should stay away.

“I had confidence his heart was solid, his theology is sound and the message he’s always bought to the body of Christ would come forth,” Byrd said. “The Bible is filled with great leaders, men and women of God, who have failed. They were restored and resumed roles they were called to previously.”

In the sermons, Haggard said a co-worker of his father molested him when he was 7, an experience that “started to produce fruit” when he turned 50. Haggard said something “started to rage in my mind and in my heart.” Haggard said though some allegations were exaggerated, “I really did sin.”

He apologized for making his family suffer, acknowledged suicidal thoughts and chastised church leaders for missing an opportunity to use his scandal to “communicate the gospel worldwide.” Haggard said he emerged with a stronger Christian faith and marriage than he’d ever had.

Byrd said he was not restoring Haggard to Christian ministry and introduced him as a businessman — hinting at a possible future speaking to churches and civic groups.

“You could make a career out of your reformed fallen Christian life,” said David Edward Harrell, a retired Auburn University history professor who studies charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity. “What you can’t do is go back and do the same thing. Once you’ve lost that clientele, it’s lost.”

Evangelicals believe God can change hearts, yet Haggard also must be held accountable and should not return to ministry early, if ever, said David Neff, editor of Christianity Today magazine.

“It’s like someone who has announced he’s an alcoholic and they’ve got that under control and are dry now,” said Neff, a National Association of Evangelicals executive committee member. “You don’t want to chance putting them back in the situation where it could happen again.”

The risk is diminished if Haggard seeks a role outside the pulpit, Neff said. Yet if Haggard stumbles again as a Christian speaker, it could crush those he inspired, he said.

On the Sunday after Haggard’s return went public, Russ Gordon sat studying his Bible in the coffee shop of New Life Church in Colorado Springs. A church member for 12 years, Gordon said he’s concerned Haggard stopped the restoration process, but he listened to Haggard’s sermons and found them sincere.

“I can’t really judge what’s in his heart,” Gordon said. “I think we have to watch and observe and see his actions. We as Christians believe in giving second chances. I just say, we all have fallen short.”

Sitting a few tables away, Sandy Oltrogge had harsher words for her former pastor.

“I wish he’d just leave it alone and let God promote him and not promote himself,” she said. “It’s good he can apologize, but I don’t think anyone can believe anything he says after that.”

A New Life spokeswoman would not comment on whether the church believes Haggard has violated his severance agreement, which paid him a year’s salary. The church is trying to move on.

“It’s sort of like the mouse in the corner,” said church elder Paul Ballantyne. “If he wants to squeak, he can squeak. But I don’t think it’s going to affect New Life.”

Haggard’s replacement, Brady Boyd, approved a three-sentence statement saying that while the church cannot endorse Haggard returning to ministry, “we do wish him only success in his business endeavors.”

And on the day Haggard returned to the pulpit in another state, Boyd began a sermon series on heaven.

A Web page labeled “Ana Boot Camp” recently offered its members a seemingly irresistible proposition: a 30-day regimen designed to help them drop some serious pounds, no exercise needed. The catch was that the group’s members were to vary their daily caloric intake from 500 (less than half the daily minimum requirement for women recommended by the American College of Sports Medicine) to zero. They were supposed to track their progress, fast to make up for the days they accidentally “overate” and support each other as they worked toward their common goal of radical weight loss.

Pro-anorexia, or “pro-ana,” Web sites (with more than one using the “Ana Boot Camp” name) have for years been a controversial Internet fixture, with users sharing extreme diet tips and posting pictures of emaciated girls under headlines such as “thinspiration.” But what was unusual about the site mentioned above (which is no longer available) was where it was hosted: the ubiquitous social networking site Facebook.com. The (largely female) users who frequent pro-ana sites have typically done so anonymously, posting under pseudonyms and using pictures of fashion models to represent themselves. Now, as the groups increasingly launch pages on Facebook, linking users’ real-life profiles to their eating disorders, the heated conversation around anorexia has become more public. Many pro-ana Facebookers say the groups provide an invaluable support system to help them cope with their disease, but psychologists worry that the growth of such groups could encourage eating disorders in others.

Rose, 17, a Maryland high-school senior who, like several other women interviewed for this story, asked to be identified only by her first name, was active in pro-ana Facebook groups for two years. There, she found a community of people like her—people who had a disease with which few of their friends could identify. “These sites provided a setting where I could talk about the illness without people trying to fix me or tell me that what I’m doing is horrible, disgusting, maladaptive,” she says. “For me, part of the illness was just about getting attention. You feel so lonely and you want someone to notice you, and I guess that’s kind of the way to do it, even with other sick people.”

Dr. Steven Crawford, associate director of the Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt in Baltimore, sees the openness of the Facebook site as part of its appeal. Increasing numbers of teenage patients at the center are joining Facebook groups that proclaim their disorders to the world, which Crawford believes is a means of adolescent rebellion: “It’s almost like putting it in your face: I have an eating disorder. I am anorexic.”

Pro-ana group creators insist that they aren’t recruiting anorexics and are just supporting each other. In fact, there are some groups that are legitimately focused on recovery. Still, the effects of even such makeshift support groups are likely not as benign as some fans claim. “The more types of these sites that you use, the higher your risk for disordered eating is,” says Stanford professor Rebecka Peebles, M.D., acknowledging that that correlation doesn’t prove that the sites necessarily contribute to the disorder. A 2006 study that she coauthored found that 96 percent of teens diagnosed with eating disorders who visited pro-eating disorder Web sites learned new dieting and purging techniques, and almost 50 percent of teens who visited sites ostensibly devoted to eating disorder recovery also learned new weight-loss tips.

Banks announced Monday she found a doctor to pay for Isis King, the first transgender contestant on “America’s Next Top Model,” to undergo sex reassignment surgery. King, 22, was born male and went from a homeless shelter to cycle 11 of Banks’ reality competition show after producers discovered her at a photo shoot. Now she’s eager to be known for more than her gender.

“I look at it like, ‘Yes, I’m the first transgender contestant, but OK, lets move past it now,” King tells Banks in today’s episode of “The Tyra Banks Show.” “I try not to think about [being transgendered] because … I feel like I really was born in the wrong body, and it’s just the one thing that makes me feel uncomfortable.”

Banks later surprises King with Dr. Marci Bowers, the gender reassignment surgeon who will evaluate and operate on King, to the tune of $20,000 to $35,000.

Banks’ decision to debut King as her show’s first transgender contestant was a bold move for a network reality series. King was eliminated almost midway through the current season, in part because she was uncomfortable posing in a swimsuit.

Because he’s openly gay, Bishop Gene Robinson has been a figure of considerable controversy in the Episcopal Church. He’ll be in Dallas tomorrow night to be honored at the Black Tie Dinner, a popular annual fundraiser for groups supportive of the LGBT community. And tomorrow afternoon he’ll meet with a local transgender advocacy group. Details below

Published: November 17, 2008

The videotaped beating of a transgender woman in police custody in Memphis last February led to charges against two officers and national condemnation from gay rights groups. The officers were fired, and the Police Department overhauled some of its procedures and began sensitivity training for the entire force.

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Mark Weber, The Commercial Appeal

Duanna Johnson, a transgender woman, was found fatally shot near downtown Memphis.

But a week ago, the woman, Duanna Johnson, 43, was found fatally shot near downtown. Ms. Johnson’s death has revived scrutiny of the case as the department is under pressure to find the killer.

“Duanna Johnson’s case was tragic before, and now it’s an almost unimaginable loss,” said Jared Feuer, the Southern regional director of Amnesty International. “Her treatment demonstrates a culture of violence against transgender people that must be addressed.”

Ms. Johnson sustained a gunshot wound to the head late on Nov. 9, the police said, and officers found her body after responding to a shooting call in North Memphis. Investigators said three men were seen near the crime scene before the officers arrived, but police officials say they have no suspects, have made no arrests and do not have a motive for the killing.

The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay civil rights group, called for a federal investigation.

Ms. Johnson’s case attracted national attention in June after local television stations obtained a grainy surveillance videotape that showed a police officer, identified as Bridges McRae, striking her repeatedly with a gloved fist with handcuffs slipped over his knuckles and pepper-spraying her in the face.

Another officer, James Swain, held down the 6-foot-5 Ms. Johnson during the assault, which occurred on Feb. 12 after she was arrested on a prostitution charge. Ms. Johnson, who was in a booking area at the Shelby County Jail in Memphis at the time of the attack, told the authorities that Officer McRae had also hurled antigay epithets at her.

“The shock value of that video was incredible,” said Arthur E. Horne III, one of the lawyers who represented Ms. Johnson in a threatened federal civil rights lawsuit against the city, the Police Department and the officers involved in the attack.

The video was splashed across the Internet. The Memphis police director, Larry Godwin, said the crime left him “sick” and “infuriated.” Mayor Willie W. Herenton called the attack “disgusting” and promised to enforce any punishment doled out by the judicial system. The Federal Bureau of Investigation also opened an inquiry into the case to check for possible civil rights violations.

In June, the department fired Officer McRae and Officer Swain, who was a probationary officer, and asked the Tennessee Equality Project, a gay rights group, to hold training sessions for officers about sexual orientation.

Mr. Horne had offered to forgo a lawsuit if the city settled with Ms. Johnson for $1.3 million. He said her estate might still proceed with a lawsuit against the city, the department and the two officers over the beating.

“Hopefully,” Mr. Horne said, “it will open the eyes of people in Memphis, the country and the world to the challenges that transgender and gay people face due to hate crimes. The only bright side of these crimes may be that they can effectuate some change for transgender people.”

Jonathan Cole, the Shelby County chairman of the Tennessee Equality Project, praised the Police Department as embracing the problem. But Mr. Cole said that Ms. Johnson’s killing demonstrated how much discrimination remained in Memphis.

“We’re a sleepy Southern town,” he said. “For the most part, I think people in the South treat each other well. But there are prejudices that people have, and those prejudices come out in ways that are often violent when no one is looking.”

In All Too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in U.S. State Prisons, released today, the Human Rights Watch Women’s Rights Project charges that in state prisons from Georgia to California, male officers are sexually abusing female prisoners with nearly total impunity. State and federal officials in a position to address such misconduct often deny that it exists or fail to take adequate steps to prevent it. As a result, sexual misconduct in U.S. state prisons for women is emerging as an explosive national problem.

Human Rights Watch calls on all states to adopt and enforce prison rules that clearly define and prohibit all forms of sexual misconduct, including sexual intercourse and touching, inappropriate visual surveillance, and verbal degradation and harassment. We further call on states to make all sexual contact by officers with prisoners a crime and to ensure that correctional employees who engage in such misconduct are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. .The United States has the dubious distinction of incarcerating the largest known number of prisoners in the world, of which a steadily increasing number are women. Since 1980, the number of women entering U.S. prisons had risen by almost 400 percent, roughly double the incarceration rate increase of males. Fifty-two percent of these prisoners are African-American women who constitute only fourteen percent of the total U.S. female population. According to current estimates, at least half of all female prisoners have experienced some form of sexual abuse prior to incarceration.

“The situation for women in U.S. state prisons is intolerable,” said Dorothy Q. Thomas, director of the Human Rights Watch Women’s Rights Project and an author of the report. “Male officers are sexually abusing female prisoners while the state and federal governments largely look the other way. It doesn’t take a lot of resources to remedy this problem, just the political will to put a stop to it.”

One of the main factors contributing to sexual misconduct in U.S. state prisons is that the U.S., in violation of international norms, allows male officers to serve in positions that involve constant physical contact with female prisoners. Thus, the increased number of women in U.S. state prisons are more often than not being guarded by men. In fact, in many women’s facilities male officers outnumber their female counterparts by two, and sometimes three to one.

All Too Familiar reflects research into sexual abuse of women in U.S. state prisons conducted by the Human Rights Watch Women’s Rights Project and other Human Rights Watch staff from March 1994 to November 1996. It is based on interviews with the U.S. federal government, state departments of corrections and district attorneys, correctional employees, civil and women’s rights lawyers, prisoner aid organizations, and over sixty prisoners formerly or currently incarcerated in eleven women’s prisons in California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York, and the District of Columbia (D.C.). It finds that male officers vaginally, anally, and orally rape and sexually assault and abuse female prisoners. They use mandatory pat-frisks to grope women’s breasts, buttocks, and vaginal areas, view them inappropriately while in a state of undress, and engage in constant verbal harassment of female prisoners, contributing to a custodial environment that is often hostile and highly sexualized. In some cases, women have been impregnated as a result of sexual misconduct and some of these prisoners have faced additional abuse in the form of inappropriate segregation, denial of adequate health care, and/or pressure to seek an abortion.

In committing such gross misconduct, male officers have abused their nearly absolute power over female prisoners to force them to have sex, either through actual or threatened physical violence or through the provision or, by implication, threat to deny goods and privileges. In other cases, male officers have offered or provided goods and privileges to female prisoners as a form of reward for engaging in sexual relations or have violated their most basic professional duty and engaged in sexual contact with female prisoners absent the use or threat of force or any material exchange.

The U.S. is clearly bound under constitutional and international law to prohibit all forms of custodial sexual misconduct. Yet neither the nation’s capital nor any of the five states investigated for this report are adequately upholding these national and international obligations. All of them have prison rules concerning sexual misconduct, but they often refer only vaguely to “overfamiliarity” or “fraternization.” Where criminal laws exist, they are inadequately enforced.

Among the obstacles to the eradication of custodial sexual misconduct are:

-Correctional systems routinely refuse to acknowledge this problem and often only do so when class actions suits are lodged against them.

-Most departments of corrections have failed to establish credible internal grievance, investigatory and disciplinary procedures that do not expose women prisoners to retaliation or punishment and guarantee that abusive officers are appropriately sanction.

-Few state legislatures have established independent monitors to oversee the prison systems, leaving most departments of corrections to investigate themselves.

-State police are not consistently informed of suspected criminal sexual misconduct and even when they are, such cases are rarely prosecuted.

The ability of nongovernmental monitors and private attorneys effectively to challenge abuses within the state prison systems for women has been seriously compromised by the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), which President Bill Clinton signed into law in April 1996.

-The PLRA dramatically limits the ability of individuals and nongovernmental organizations to challenge abusive prison conditions through litigation.

-It terminates any court order regarding unlawful conditions or practices in a given prison after two years, which is often an unreasonably short time to achieve any meaningful change in the way a prison is operated.

-The PLRA restricts court-awarded attorneys’ fees, which are the main income for prisoner rights attorneys, and severely limits the authority of federal courts to assign judicial officers to oversee prison reform, a key tool for implementing remedial court orders.

The neglect of sexual misconduct by U.S. officials has reached the highest levels of the government. Under federal law, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has the power both to prosecute correctional officials who violate federal civil rights statues and to investigate and institute civil actions against a state facility that is engaging in a pattern or practice of subjecting prisoners to “egregious or flagrant” conditions. Unfortunately, while the DOJ has investigated some women’s facilities for sexual misconduct, it is falling far short of its obligations to protect against this abuse. To our knowledge, the department rarely criminally prosecutes a correctional official suspected of sexually abusing incarcerated women, and civil investigations into abusive facilities are infrequent. Moreover, although the DOJ regularly receives complaints of custodial sexual misconduct, the department maintains no system for recording such complaints, nor does it systematically monitor the number of complaints concerning any particular institution or type of abuse. Absent such information, it is virtually impossible for the DOJ to ensure that it is fully aware of all the sexual misconduct problems that fall within its jurisdiction.

In its first report to the U.N. committee that monitors compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), ratified by the U.S. in 1993, the U.S. stated that the problem of custodial sexual misconduct in U.S. state prisons for women is “addressed through staff training and through criminal statutes prohibiting such activity.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Human Rights Watch calls on the United States publicly to acknowledge the custodial sexual misconduct that pervades its state prison facilities for women and makes the following recommendations urging the federal government and its constituent states to take meaningful steps to prevent, investigate, punish and ultimately eliminate this pressing problem. More detailed recommendations are included in the body of the report.

Lars-Erik Holm said the National Board of Health and Welfare is declassifying the behaviors as illnesses to avoid strengthening prejudice against the behaviors, the Swedish news service Tidningarnas Telegrambyra reported Monday.

“These individuals’ sexual preferences have nothing to do with society,” Holm told the Dagens Nyheter newspaper.

Fetishism, fetishistic transvestism, sadomasochism, gender identity disorder in youth and multiple disorders of sexual preferences are among the behaviors that will also be removed from the disease list.
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