ABC to celebrate sanctity of marriage by having Ted Haggard swap wives with Gary Busey

ABC’s Celebrity Wife Swap continues its mission to reinforce the bonds of traditionally defined heterosexual marriage by recruiting some of its most serious defenders to make a brief mockery of it, following up an earlier dalliance with Victoria “Gays Are Gross” Jackson with an episode that finds born-again Christian soldier and Promise Keepers minister Gary Busey swapping spouses with former National Association of Evangelicals president Ted Haggard. So, one is a man with a history of drug abuse, a disconcertingly toothsome smile, and a dangerous bite radius who’s given to making unintelligible, rambling statements that often have something to do with God. AND THE OTHER IS GARY BUSEY. Blammo! That's the ol' switcheroo!

Anyway, since losing his flock in the wake of a scandal involving crystal meth and male prostitutes—mistakes that anyone could make—Haggard has been coping the only way he knows how that doesn’t involve meth and male prostitutes: By making repeated bids for reality TV stardom, first with his TLC special Scandalous, which followed Haggard’s founding of a new church based on “acceptance”—specifically, the acceptance of donations, and the acceptance that Haggard should be allowed to parlay his very public fall from grace into a non-stop clamoring for media attention, even if that means dragging wife Gayle onto an episode of Divorce Court to shame others who might be considering getting a divorce, and talk about how strong their marriage is now that Haggard is so totally over meth and homosexuality.

In keeping with that, Haggard will have Gayle trade places with Busey’s girlfriend Steffanie Sampson—because on Celebrity Wife Swap, even the term “wife” is loosely defined—at the Colorado Springs GLBT Pride Center, where all of the assembled gays who have been denied the right to marry can appreciate firsthand the solemnity of the very institution they’d be destroying. Maybe then they will learn something. [ColoradoSprings.com via The Huffington Post]