After denying that he had ever met a gay escort who claimed to have had a three-year sexual relationship with him, the Rev. Ted Haggard admitted Friday that he had summoned the escort to give him a massage in a Denver hotel room and bought methamphetamine from him.
But Haggard, one of the nation's leading evangelical ministers, maintained that the two men never had sex and that he threw out the drugs before using them.
"I never kept it very long because it was wrong," Haggard told a reporter on Friday. "I was tempted, I bought it, but I never used it."
Haggard's tortuous explanation came two days after the male escort, Michael Jones, stepped forward to allege that Haggard was a monthly client for the past three years. On Thursday, Haggard had resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals and stepped down as pastor of his 14,000-member Colorado Springs megachurch, pending an investigation of the charges.
Haggard's difficulties are bound to echo beyond his own church, especially on the eve of the midterm elections. He is the maypole at the center of several intersecting evangelical power circles, with ties to the Bush administration.
The evangelical association's executive committee unanimously accepted Haggard's resignation on Friday after learning that he had admitted that some of the allegations were true, said the Rev. L. Roy Taylor, chairman of the board of directors, and the stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church in America.
In Colorado, Haggard was a leader in the campaign for Amendment 43, which would define marriage in the state as a union between a man and a woman. Haggard's accuser said this was his main motivation for going public about Haggard's alleged homosexual trysts.
In a telephone interview from Denver, Jones, 49, said, "When the federal marriage amendment came up before the Senate earlier this year, I wanted to see the stance of his church, and the more I read about it, the angrier I got."
"He's preaching against homosexuals and yet he's having gay sex behind people's backs," Jones said.