Crazy Ted Haggard And Crazy Gary Busey’s Family Square Off In Their First ‘Celebrity Wife Swap’ Episode
Last night disgraced Colorado Springs pastor Ted Haggard and wife Gayle Haggard graced American living rooms with their first appearance on ABC’s “Celebrity Wife Swap” along with one-time Oscar nominee Gary Busey and Steffanie Sampson. The two women left written “manuals” for each other summarizing their family roles, political and religious views, and their daily routines.
Though Sampson is Busey’s fiance and not strictly a wife partaking in the wife swap, viewers anticipated drama when she traded places with Gayle Haggard and travelled from Los Angeles to Colorado Springs. Sampson describes herself as “not involved in organized religion” and got a little testy with Ted Haggard over the topic of gay marriage.
The Haggards initially told FOX News that they decided to do the show because they wanted to “communicate hope to people.”
“With so many people losing their homes and their jobs and families and so much turmoil going on right now, we thought with our story being the parents of a handicapped child and going through a scandal five years ago, that if people could actually see through the trauma that our family actually grew closer together,” Haggard said.
In the manual Gayle Haggard wrote for Sampson in the episodee, Haggard’s past is referred to as “the scandal.”
The former pastor and president of the National Association of Evangelicals resigned in 2006 from his Colorado Springs-based New Life megachurch after allegations of a sexual relationship with a gay male escort surfaced. Yet the scandal just ended up launching the Haggards into the public eye and the family appeared in an episode of “Divorce Court” in 2009, Gayle Haggard wrote a book entitled “Why I Stayed,” a TLC documentary aired with the title, “Ted Haggard: Scandalous,” and Ted Haggard even made a cameo appearance in “The Waiting Game,” a Christian sex comedy.
He has also since publicly endorsed 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, in part for Gingrich’s own wife-swapping.
Ted Haggard, though he admitted last year to GQ writer Kevin Roose that he used methamphetamine to masturbate to gay and heterosexual porn, told Sampson he prefers to distinguish marriage as between a man and a woman but added that he believes in civil unions.
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I never followed the Haggard scandal, but after watching this episode of Celebrity Wife Swap. I have a lot of respect for Gayle. She takes her wedding vows to a completely new level! It was striking to see how well the wives got along in their new homes considering how very different the families and women are.