Lauren Sandler

“She always calls. She’s always good in a disaster. She always knows what to do,” says Christophe, who still refers to his wife in the present tense.

He went down to the basement to get some of Kirsten’s breast milk out of the freezer — she had saved a two-month supply, pumped at the nursing station on the 104th floor of Tower Two. She had called from her office that morning to say that the first tower had been hit by a plane, that she was OK. An hour earlier Christophe had kissed her goodbye in the lobby and rushed off to his office a block away on Broadway. He had been late for a court date.

Three weeks later, Kirsten Christophe’s body was identified with the help of DNA derived from a sample of Gretchen’s baby-fine hair. And Charles was forced to accept that suddenly, officially, unimaginably, he was a single father.

“This is my life now,” he stutters. “It breaks my heart.”

Many of us have navigated beyond our immediate and emotional reactions to the events of Sept. 11. We have crammed the horrifying images and attendant incomprehension into a mental closet that won’t quite lock behind us. The door still flies open from time to time, jimmied by the force of an unexpected visceral reminder.

But Charles Christophe lives behind that door, stranded there with hundreds and hundreds of other men. For them, the closet is sealed shut against their former lives. They used to be husbands and fathers, balancing the roles with the help of their wives, their children’s mothers. Now they are widowers and single fathers, their lives composed of constant and inconceivable challenges, both logistical and emotional.

Americans have endured the loss of male veterans of war in staggering numbers. But we have never experienced the loss of hundreds of women, many of them mothers, in a single day in what is now described as an act of war.

It is impossible at this stage to know how many wives died that September morning — even the total number of those killed is disputed by the hundreds every day. Originally it was estimated that more than 1,000 women died in the attacks. That number has slipped into the unknown hundreds, still a figure of historical significance. Out of the 36,568 Americans killed in the Korean War, only two were women. In Vietnam, just eight of the 58,204 who died were female. And in the Gulf War, when 383 Americans were killed, a total of 15 women were lost.

“When soldiers die, there’s usually a woman taking care of the family. It’s a different ballgame,” says Rabbi Earl Grollman, who has written more than 20 books on grief and mourning.

Many of the women who died on Sept. 11 worked at home as tirelessly as they did in their WTC offices. They did the laundry, cooked the meals, shopped for groceries, cleaned the house. They curated their families’ social lives and orchestrated their daily routines. Their families don’t experience their loss just through the disappearance of a familiar laugh, a tender touch or a quirky sense of humor. The emptiness created by their deaths stretches to fill each corner of the daily lives of the people they left behind.

For the women’s husbands, this means that, in addition to the overwhelming task of grieving, they confront daily demands and myriad tasks, many of which are completely unfamiliar. At the same time, they are in many cases the sole caretakers of young children struggling with inner suffering, as well as a need to return to their old routines.

“Everyone’s sense of safety has been shaken, and children more than ever need routine to have a sense that the adults will be there and be in charge,” says Ronnye Halpern, a widow who coordinates bereavement services at Cabrini Hospital in Manhattan. “Children haven’t formed inside themselves an internal kind of structure, and routines do that for them on the outside, which can be very reassuring. Baths, meals, whatever can be established — it’s going to be different than it was before, but you do find a new way of living. That’s the task for everybody.”

And it is an incredibly painful task for widowers, who are aware of the necessity of routines but are struggling mightily to establish some. “Dinner is the most difficult time of every day,” says Harold Weiss, who lost his wife, Margo, in the attacks. She had been in her office for only 10 minutes before the first plane hit her building. She was on the phone with a friend at the time, discussing 2-year-old Jason’s first day of school. “We still haven’t resolved how we have to do meals in the long term,” says Weiss. “At least in Manhattan there’s a lot of takeout available.”

But dinner is easy compared to some tasks that seem almost insurmountable. “We’re at the stage where my 9-year-old daughter is thinking of her body changing,” says Weiss through tears. “What do I do then? What will the rest of her life be like? Everything from brushing her hair in the morning,” he says, pausing to get his breath. “My God, I had never even brushed her hair.”

“In all of this, the grief is devastating, of course, but maybe it is the raising of daughters which is the most terrifying,” says Clark University professor Cynthia Enloe, who studies the experience of widows and war. “I never hear women who are suddenly widowed with young children talk about this kind of fear. They may be completely overwhelmed financially, but they don’t ever seem to be scared about how to be a parent,” she says. “It’s usually very different than this. They draw in the help of those around them. They’re not so alone.”

Christophe hasn’t consciously rejected help, but circumstances have made his new life unbearably solitary. He quit his job after the attacks to search for his wife and care for his daughter. He mentions a few friends who live near him in Maplewood, N.J., one of whom escaped Tower 1 and accompanied Christophe on his hunt for his missing wife in those frenzied first few weeks.

“He’s the one who has understood it the best, but there’s not so much time to see him now,” says Christophe. “I have to find an office, to get back to work and start paying the bills now, not just take care of Gretchen.” In addition, Christophe’s family is far away. His father, also a widower, lives in Europe. His wife’s family lives in the Midwest. Kirsten’s sister came for a couple of weeks after the attacks, then her mother took over, but she needed to return home soon after to care for her own husband, who was diagnosed with cancer this summer. She’ll return for the Christmas holiday, but will have to leave her son-in-law alone with Gretchen soon after. Thanksgiving was a couple of hours at a friend’s house, then home to bathe Gretchen and put her to sleep.

“When I was notified about the body I was by myself,” says Christophe. “You have to go to the cemetery, find a place for the grave. How do you know what to do alone?” His thoughts, as always, return to his wife. “We were so close, so happy. We talked all the time. Even on business trips, we’d be on the phone for hours. My cellphone bills! And now there’s no one.”

Christophe sought out a therapist in the first days, but since then has done his grieving alone, lost in the demanding schedule of his new role as a single parent. “I needed to talk to someone just a few times, because I was going to explode. So there was a kind of release of what was inside of me, but then I had to get on,” he says.

This is typical of how men tend to mourn, say those who counsel them, especially in the first six months or year of mourning. Women, in contrast, tend to be quicker to reach out for support, both among their friends and in more structured bereavement groups. “Women will talk and cry with other women, but men in general go back to work. Men will change the subject when asked about how they’re doing,” says Grollman. “In any support group, if men make up 10 percent of the people there, you’re lucky.”

“They’re still in shock, just trying to get through what they have to do each day,” says Halpern. Few people, women or men, she says, are seeking treatment. “Last year I had a wait list for my groups. Now, it’s like pulling teeth.” Bereavement groups set up around the city have reported a complete absence of new widowers — evidence of the gender divide in mourning.

“They won’t ask for directions — you think they’re asking for help?” asks Halpern. “Men are taught to act strong, to focus on moving beyond it. Defenses have always been given a bad rap, but they’re what help us survive.”

In fact, says Halpern, it’s hard to imagine how men like Christophe would manage the daily pressures of sudden single fatherhood without the aid of emotional shock to push them into their new tasks. “I guess you could call it a sort of blessing,” Halpern concedes. “Women need the process; men need to have their plan.”

Rabbi Grollman worries about how long these men will bottle up their shock and deal with it alone. “Grief is grief, and if men want to grieve in a different way than women do, they should be allowed to,” he says. But the longer they keep it to themselves, the harder it can be to manage. “It becomes a kind of emotional constipation,” he says.

Some people believe that the very public nature of the calamity and the first days of mourning that followed it may have made the process of recovery even more difficult. “Men tend to have a very difficult time with group shows of grief,” says Scott Campbell, coauthor of the 1996 book “Widower: When Men Are Left Alone.” “In this situation, I think it was very helpful at first to have the whole country, the whole world even, mourning with them. But a few weeks later people moved back to their lives, and they were left to deal with it all alone, in perhaps a more intense way, coming down from that initial feeling of support.”

For men who do enlist help, it tends to be an intensely private enterprise. Weiss has sought therapy for himself and for his daughter, but their counselor comes to their Manhattan apartment and speaks with each of them separately. He is fortunate to have resources to assist with the logistics — his mother moved into his Upper West Side apartment building to help out, and he has two baby sitters whom his children love. This extraordinary support has allowed him to spend more time engaging in his grief rather than in the multitude of daily parental pressures that burden fathers who are newly single and grieving.

“I think that my experience in this process is learning that men are a lot more emotional than you’d think, but it’s very private, and very raw,” he says.

Weiss, like Christophe, speaks of a devastating loneliness that has intensified with the holidays, even as he is surrounded by loved ones. “Having gone through a holiday weekend with loving family all around, I still felt so lonely, so strangely lonely that day,” Weiss says of a difficult Thanksgiving — a day his wife used to relish. “Because of the nature of what I was missing, of course. She’s just not replaceable.”

This painful fact is evident not just in Weiss’ heart, but everywhere in his life now. He has had to hire a wake-up call service, since Margo never forgot to set the alarm clock, but he always did. “Margo was the center of our family,” he says. “She took care of all of us, took care of everything. What’s so cruel is that she probably felt better about herself and was looking forward to the future more just before she died than any other time in her adult life. And she was beautiful. God, she was just so beautiful.”

After Thanksgiving, Weiss decided to begin the heartbreaking process of going through Margo’s closet with his daughter, Parker. He felt it was time to try to move on, but it was a process he quickly aborted. “I barely began,” he says. “Everything brings back a memory, memories of when she wore a particular dress, how stunning she looked. I was so lucky. And then there are other things I know she never wore. That’s really hard, too. I can’t really do it yet.

“To see it all, you’d think she’s still living here. I’m still expecting her to walk down the street,” continues Weiss, his voice trembling. “But obviously, I know intellectually that that’s not going to happen.” It will be up to 9-year-old Parker to select which of her mother’s outfits she would like to save. She has already chosen her mother’s wedding dress and shoes.

“I am really focused on my children and what is best for them. Everything else is secondary,” says Weiss. And it’s clear that while he is responsible for making major household decisions and delegating all he can, he wants Parker to decide how she’ll respond to her mother’s loss. Her first choice was to write a eulogy for her mother’s memorial service in September, which she courageously delivered herself.

“She was very poised and brave,” says Weiss. “It wasn’t morbid, just her words and thoughts about her mom, and how she’s extraordinarily impacted by this.” Parker also opted to change her Halloween costume. She was planning to go as a vampire in Victorian dress, but felt that day that her creepy garb hit gruesomely close to home. She went trick-or-treating instead dressed as a ’40s movie star. Her heroic date for the evening, appropriately, was a firefighter — 2-year-old Jason’s costume of choice.

Parker doesn’t want to talk about her mother’s death yet — and Weiss doesn’t push to her to do so, outside of her private therapy. She has thrown herself into a routine of gymnastics, piano lessons and chorus, feeling more comfortable outside the sad confines of the family’s apartment.

Weiss feels the same misery, which he fears will only intensify if the family stays home for the holidays. Weiss, although Jewish, has assembled a beautiful collection of ornaments over the years. Each winter he, Parker and Margo would decorate their tree together. This year, the box of ornaments will be left behind in New York when the family travels to California to spend two weeks with Margo’s family.

And in the new year, the Weiss family will make an even more difficult trip. They’ll go to Hawaii, where Margo was raised, so Jason and Parker can see for the first time where their mother spent a childhood very different from their newly tragic ones. “We planned this trip long before all this. And now we feel like we just have to go. You never really have a chance to say goodbye,” says Weiss.

In the three months he has been a single father, Weiss has learned what to pack to take care of toddler Jason and knows not to forget Parker’s hair-detangling spray. “I think she’s figured out by now that I’m never going to be very good with her hair,” he says. “I can never be her mother for her. And the only thing I can ask for from her, from myself, from everybody, is just an enormous amount of patience — just time and patience.”

But watching Capitol Hill shift to Democratic control this week has challenged assumptions about Evangelicals and the GOP. According to the Associated Press, one-third of Evangelical voters supported Democrats this year, up more than 10 percent from 2004. And while many election-watchers predicted that sex scandals — be they Mark Foley’s or Ted Haggard’s — would keep Evangelicals away from the polls, they turned out in even higher numbers than they did to reelect Bush. Twenty-four percent of voters this year were born-again, up 1 point from 2004. And unlike in recent elections, Americans who attend weekly religious services voted in almost equal numbers for Democratic and Republican candidates.

No matter how much some voters may have opposed gay marriage — banning it this time around in seven states — many refused to vote a straight ticket. “We’re sick of being manipulated for Republican politics,” one conservative Christian voter told Salon in Colorado Springs on Election Day. “We’re sick of being taken for granted. I’m not saying I’m a liberal, but I’m fed up with these folks, and I’m not alone.”

Many voters told exit pollsters that their anger about corruption in government and the quagmire in Iraq led them across party lines. However, the races in which religious-right candidates lost tended to go to equally religious Democrats. Ken Blackwell lost his bid to govern Ohio to a Methodist minister. Rick Santorum handed his Senate seat in Pennsylvania to a pro-life Catholic, Bob Casey Jr. Rep. Charles Taylor was kicked out of Congress in favor of Evangelical Heath Shuler. It remains to be seen whether these races foreshadow a 2008 election in which candidates increasingly attempt to out-pray each other for political gain.

So what, exactly, has happened to the GOP’s heretofore bedrock coalition of devout Christians? Salon asked Richard Cizik, vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, to help us understand the changing colors of this year’s “Purpose-Driven” vote.

Did Evangelicals turn out for referendums banning same-sex marriage or stem-cell research, and, instead of voting a straight Republican ticket, vote for Democratic candidates?

I know from my experience in Virginia that’s happened. I talked to a fair number of Evangelicals who supported the same-sex marriage amendment and then punched the ballot for Jim Webb on the basis of the war issue. I know people very close to me — dare I say in my own family — who did just that.

What turned some conservative Christians against the party candidates they’ve historically supported?

The Republicans lost a lot of Evangelical votes with the corruption issue, and rightly so. The standard you see for voting is not as simple as [gauging] a politician’s stance on same-sex marriage or abortion. Moses gave some good advice: Pick capable leaders who are God-fearing, trustworthy and hate dishonest gain. Oh, really? You mean to say that God cares about greed? Just look at Colossians 3:5. What is greed? The apostle Paul says greed is idolatry.

Supporting the GOP isn’t one of the commandments the last time I checked, but it has felt that way in the past few elections.

Look, to be biblically consistent you have to be politically inconsistent. Evangelicals have to follow their Lord first, and not simply bend to the whims of a political party for the advantages that come with it. That is not good enough. We are not a cheap date. We have appeared so because of the alignment that many within our movement had had with Republicans.

Exit polls suggest that corruption was as important as the war — and more important than social issues — in determining the Evangelical vote. Do you think voters overreacted to the scandals that afflicted the GOP?

If there were some Evangelicals who became disenchanted with Republicans over corruption, and it seems to be from the election results, it was well justified. Any kind of funny business promoted voter retribution. And that’s the way it should be. We want trustworthy leaders who will tell the truth. We don’t need to go like supplicants to the political parties. We say, consider what our agenda is and join us.

Does this political moment strike you as a turning point, not just among some conservative Christians, but within the Democratic Party?

We need as Evangelicals to take stock of where we are as a country — not just ecclesiastically and theologically and otherwise, but politically too. And right now is as good a time as any to take serious stock. The Democrats know this, especially if they run candidates like Heath Shuler. Evangelicals didn’t depart entirely, but enough flipped over to make it possible for Democrats in certain districts to win, like Shuler did.

But wouldn’t it be hasty to underestimate the lasting appeal of Evangelical Republicans? Some candidates are honing their messages to widen their bases.

Sure. Gov. Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota is one Evangelical who is a conservative who won in a Democratic state. We need to take a look at him for his crossover appeal. The strategy is not a zero-sum game in which one side has to lose for the other side to win. That is so passi and unfortunate.

Would you say that many Evangelicals feel like they’re paid lip service by GOP candidates who take their votes for granted? Was this week a wakeup call?

Let’s just say that I think that for a long time the attitude [of politicians] has been, “Give them Oval Office cuff links and they’ll be satisfied.” I got mine in 1980. I don’t need any cuff links and haven’t for a long time. Cuff links aren’t on our agenda.

Though Lamborn was favored to beat his opponent, a retired Air Force officer named Jay Fawcett, the race had become tighter in the past couple of months than anyone could have predicted when Fawcett launched what was called by local newspaper columnists “a quixotic quest.” But the race became a nail-biter, especially after Rep. Joel Hefley, whose seat was up for grabs Tuesday night, said he refused to endorse his fellow Republican, a “disappointment” running “one of the sleaziest, most dishonest campaigns” he had seen. Even prayer — or the endorsement of the Christian Coalition and the NRA — couldn’t cover up that stinging public condemnation with “moral values” chatter, especially in national elections that hummed with talk of corruption.

Wednesday morning the two candidates were considered to be in a dead heat. In this area, which has elected a Republican to the House ever since the district was first drawn 34 years ago, a victory under these circumstances hardly felt like victory at all. Much less when considering who would be in charge of the House. And forget simply despising Nancy Pelosi’s liberal ways; these folks were deriding the “liberal Republicans” on the five military bases here who expressed anger against “stay the course” war addicts like Lamborn. Accustomed to the confidence that came with their decisive role in recent national elections, the Christian base here seemed shaken. For once, nobody seemed sure that all their prayers would be answered.

As the band struck up a Muzak-y rendition of “Just the Way You Are,” in came the local candidates in their dark suits and American flag ties, smacking their supporters’ shoulders and nervously scanning a screen listing exit polls. The song made for an ironic soundtrack to the scandal surrounding the man whose name has been spoken more in this district this week than any political candidate: Ted Haggard, the fallen pastor of this town’s nerve center, the New Life Church. Before the news broke last week that he had conducted a three-year affair with a male escort, Haggard had campaigned hard for Amendment 43 here, an initiative to ban gay marriage. It was clear that in this political congregation, no one liked him just the way he was.

But by the time the band struck up “The Best Is Yet to Come,” spirits seemed to lift a bit. The numbers coming in on the gay marriage ban, and on a referendum supporting civil unions, looked promising to a crowd that quivered in disgust at any mention of homosexuality, much less homosexuality with equal rights. Of all people, Mike Jones, Haggard’s accuser, was being credited with those returns. A volunteer in a black suit and red shirt named Dave Cavanagh — who calls Dick Cheney, whom he met campaigning this week, a “good man” — says plenty of blasé voters were spurred into action by the notion that Jones came out with his story in order to have an impact on the amendment effort. “That this was used as a political ploy to affect voting made everyone I know really angry. It was a backlash; it benefited the effort,” he said. Jones has said that he publicized his relationship with Haggard explicitly because of the marriage amendment.

Cavanagh was here after campaigning hard for Kent Lambert, a state representative he met when Lambert gave a public showing of slides he put together when he was working the border with the anti-immigration group the Minutemen. Lambert, who calls himself “a man who doesn’t keep his faith a secret, and a social conservative,” and who looks picture-perfect for his role, with his unmovable hair, giant gold ring and lapels crowded with candidate buttons, sees the scandal as helping his various causes. “The idea of someone trying to manipulate their vote gets them out to the polls,” Lambert said. That notion was playing out nationwide, as eight states easily supported prohibiting same-sex marriage. But whether fundamentalists would vote for “the sanctity of marriage” and whether they would vote for candidates who supported the White House’s Iraq fiasco still remained to be seen.

All this talk of the marriage amendment was filler, really, just nervous chatter over the vocalist walking through the crowd with a cordless mike, singing “It Had to Be You,” pointing to local candidates on the floor. Everyone in this room knew that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill Ritter had creamed Republican Bob Beauprez at the polls, and as the night stretched on, the House seat was still undecided in favor of Lamborn.

When Lamborn won the primary, his response to the press was “I had to say a prayer and ask that God’s will be done.” One got the sense tonight that plenty of prayers were being whispered around the tables set up in front of the stage.

By the time the coordinator of the Denim and Diamonds ball took the stage to belt out a showy rendition of “Crazy,” the returns were favoring this crowd: Lamborn had pulled into a decisive lead, and gay marriage looked like it would exist only in Mike Jones’ dreams. But the crowd hardly whooped it up praise-style when the numbers were projected onto a screen over the stage. Even when Lamborn finally appeared in the GOP suit-and-red-tie uniform to announce, “Things are looking good,” he was met not with ebullient cries but a polite smattering of applause. Things were looking good for this candidate, sure, but the House he was to serve in was already stacked against him. Senior Republican holy warrior Rick Santorum had been ousted by the time the red pantsuits here were heading to the cash bar. No one even bothered announcing the verdict when the marriage ban was decided by a margin even local voter James Dobson could celebrate.

Meanwhile, Lamborn was biding his time waiting for his opponent to concede. As the band wound up its final set, he talked to reporters about setting his sights on the House Armed Services Committee and made snarky comments about Nancy Pelosi. He commented that the evangelical vote refused to be “sidelined.” And then, as Mr. Biggs’ cleanup staff circulated with garbage bags, asking the last straggling volunteers to gather up their campaign signs, Lamborn took the stage to summon local candidates, winners all. They were given just a moment for lightning-fast speeches — a chance to parade the wives, thank the volunteers, and remind the tiny remaining crowd about “Republican principles” and “Republican revival,” all standard Christian political rhetoric. That rhetoric tonight would be the language of defeat in Missouri Sen. Jim Talent’s campaign: His concession speech opened by giving long-winded thanks to God, but no one here even bothered to do that in their victory speeches. These local wins meant little when the Senate was still hanging in the balance.

Lamborn himself didn’t bother to invoke his faith as he wrapped up what could hardly be called a party. Blinded by the success of the “enemy,” he couldn’t even talk about winning his seat; in fact his quick speech sounded more like an angry concession. “We’ll be able to harness a backlash,” he said. “We’re going to see what the Democrats are made of, and they’re going to do things the voters aren’t happy with. Mark my words.” His words, sure — but for once in this town, not a breath about His Word.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

Two of Haggard’s parishioners, Tim Singer and his wife, Alicia, say they usually have to drag themselves to vote. This year, they couldn’t wait. “Amendment 43 is half the reason why,” said Tim. “And Referendum I,” which would grant rights and responsibilities to same-sex couples, though without allowing marriage, per se, “is the other.”

The Singers say their neighbors, also members of the New Life Church, who share their voting practices, were all headed to the polls today for the exact same reason they were. Not to vote Republican candidate Doug Lamborn into a congressional seat, or to stem the tides sweeping Democrat Bill Ritter into the governor’s mansion, but “the gay thing,” as Alicia said, plain and simple.

“My kid said to me, ‘Mom. What’s wrong with the world? Now we gotta vote about gay stuff?’” Alicia snorts. “It’s disgusting that we should even have to think about this,” she sighed. “We’re just tired of it all. Not Pastor Ted, way back before that.”

“Yeah, I’m not just voting because of Ted,” said Tim, shaking his spiked blond hair. “I’m voting because of Rosie O’Donnell. No one pisses me off more than her. This gay stuff has gotta stop.”

Diane Hoover, a poll watcher here, says some voters have stepped forward with concerns about their paper ballots, reporting mysterious highlighter markings on the Amendment 43 section of the ballot. It’s unclear if the marks were meant to be over specific words. She’s worried that the ballots won’t scan properly because of the marks, and is investigating the problem, but has yet to hear back from a state supervisor.

Hoover, incidentally, used to work for Republican Sen. James Harvey in the 1960s, but has since “converted” to being a Democrat, since she can’t stand the way the religious right has taken over the GOP, or her town, she says. “It used to mean something very different to be a Republican than this business,” waving a hand in the direction of Haggard’s megachurch New Life across the street from the voting booths. She voted against the ban.

Same-sex marriage bans have passed in every one of the 20 states that have previously included the issue on ballots.

Lamborn is a darling of the religious right - and a former lawyer for Ted Haggard. In the wake of the Haggard scandal, he has tried over the past few days via a bevy of campaign ads to dial down his connections to the evangelical establishment. While his campaign home page may still proudly flash the logos of endorsers like Concerned Women for America and the National Pro-Life Alliance, and boast about his “100% rating from Christian Coalition of Colorado,” his brand-new persona is that of a straight-up Reagan conservative, someone who spends all his time thinking about tax cuts and border issues. Not about his “pro-family” message, and certainly not his Friday evening Bible study.

Fawcett’s run began as what many, including the Lamborn-endorsing Rocky Mountain News, considered to be an “exercise in futility.” The 5th Congressional District has not elected a Democrat since it first came into being 34 years ago. The most recent representative to fill that seat is Joel Hefley, who is retiring. Hefley has notably refused to endorse his would-be GOP successor, publicly charging him with running “one of the sleaziest, most dishonest campaigns” he has seen.

According to Fawcett’s campaign, last night the candidate received a death threat — his third since announcing his candidacy — while his headquarters was being vandalized. Campaign workers arrived at an office where the air was thick with a putrid skunklike aroma. Many of the 200 volunteers expected to come through the office today will be working in gas masks. The office has been vandalized once before, and just a week ago the campaign finance director’s car was similarly scented, while parked in front of the El Paso County Republican Office.

With the race deadlocked, tonight looks like it may be a late one for Fawcett and Lamborn. Lamborn supporters will be watching returns with the candidate tonight at Mr. Biggs Family Fun Center, about 7 miles from the church Lamborn’s buddy Ted Haggard built.

Driscoll blames Haggard’s affair with a male escort not on the former pastor’s homosexuality — which he abhors as much as that other spawn of Satan, feminism, — but on his wife, Gayle Haggard. Why? ‘Cause, he says, Gayle let herself go.

“At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this,” he wrote on his blog. “It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.”

As we all know, this argument is as illogical — that a man would have sex with another man because he was turned off by his aging wife, and not because he’s gay — as it is demeaning. How she looks should have no bearing on this. But, I must rise to Mrs. Haggard’s defense, if only to point out that Driscoll is obviously using her as an opportunity for frat-boy girl-bashing of the highest right, guys? high-five! order. Find a picture of Gayle Haggard. It’s easy to do this week, with her husband’s fall from grace splashed over the front pages. And look at her. Come on: She looks fabulous.

Her failing is not in too few hours on the treadmill, but in her beliefs. First, that she should submit to her husband, as she has preached to her women’s ministry in Colorado Springs, and as she and Ted wrote in a book they published this year called “From This Day Forward: Making Your Vows Last a Lifetime.” (It’s still for sale today at the New Life Church bookstore, and available for your ironic viewing at Amazon.) And second, that he can be healed of his “sickness” — that under the close watch of Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, God can cast the gay out, and the girl-crazy boy she married will be hers once more.

With Jesus’ help, her faith asserts, Haggard can be just as straight as the aggressively heterosexual pastor Mark Driscoll, who, on his blog, is quick to explain that his fidelity to his wife — and, thus, the Lord — has everything to do with his blonde bride’s hotness, lest we think he would have married a woman who wouldn’t keep herself up to his specifications. Otherwise how could he have resisted the women who ache to provide him with earthly pleasures?

He writes, “I started the church ten years ago when I was twenty-five years of age. Thankfully, I was married to a beautiful woman. I met my lovely wife Grace when we were seventeen, married her at twenty-one, and by God’s grace have been faithful to her in every way since the day we met. I have, however, seen some very overt opportunities for sin. On one occasion I actually had a young woman put a note into my shirt pocket while I was serving communion with my wife, asking me to have dinner, a massage, and sex with her. On another occasion a young woman emailed me a photo of herself topless and wanted to know if I liked her body.” Yeah, dude!