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Tuesday, August 28, 2007                                                                                       View Comments

Get a job, Ted...

Disgraced minister Ted Haggard is asking that donations to support him and his family be sent to a Monument group run by a twice-convicted sex offender.

Haggard, who has moved with his family to Phoenix, could not be reached for comment today.

The head of a four-member panel of ministers overseeing the fallen preacher's spiritual restoration said he will fly to Arizona Tuesday to meet with Haggard for a face-to-face explanation.

"I'm just now discovering some of that information," Mike Ware, a senior pastor at Westminster's Victory Church, said of allegations that Haggard was urging supporters to make tax-deductible donations through Families with a Mission, based in Monument.

"I can't really make any comment on that until after I've investigated ... and talked with the other overseers," Ware said.

He called Haggard's fund-raising solicitation without the overseers' approval "premature."

The revelation is the latest in the bizarre saga of Haggard, 50, who last year quit as president of the National Association of Evangelicals and was fired as pastor of a Colorado Springs megachurch after he admitted to purchasing drugs and unspecified "sexual immorality" involving a male prostitute.

Haggard was dismissed from New Life Church last November after a former Denver gay escort publicly alleged that the powerful preacher had paid him for sex over a three-year period and sometimes took methamphetamine during the encounters.

Haggard admitted paying Mike Jones for a massage and for meth but denied having sex with Jones or taking the drug.

In February, one of Haggard's spiritual advisers said the ousted founder of New Life Church emerged from three weeks of intensive counseling convinced "he is completely heterosexual" and committed to his marriage.

Haggard's new troubles surfaced after he emailed KRDO-TV reporter Tak Landrock in Colorado Springs last week seeking support while he and his family live in the Phoenix Dream Center, a halfway house for the homeless, recovering addicts, prostitutes, ex-cons and other "broken people."

"I identify," Haggard wrote of the center's troubled clientele, whom he and his wife, Gayle, will minister.

In the fundraising pitch, Haggard told KRDO "we are looking for people who will help us monthly for two years" while he and his wife study for counseling degrees at the University of Phoenix.

Haggard wrote that supporters could mail checks to him in Scottsdale, Ariz.

"If any supporters need a tax deduction for their gift, they can mail it to Families With a Mission at P.O. Box 63125, Colorado Springs, CO 80962," Haggard added.

Haggard didn't note in the solicitation that he was paid one year's salary of $138,000 in a severance package by New Life's board and still owns a Colorado Springs home valued at $715,000, according to the El Paso County Assessor's Office.

On Friday, a Seattle alternative newspaper, The Stranger, reported online that Families with a Mission was registered by Paul Gerard Huberty as a nonprofit corporation with the Colorado Secretary of State's Office.

Huberty, who originally incorporated the nonprofit in Hawaii in 2001, was listed as president of Families with a Mission in Colorado incorporation papers.

Huberty was convicted of attempted sexual assault in Hawaii in January 2004 and sentenced to 12 months in jail with six months suspended.

He also received five years of probation and is registered in Hawaii as sex offender who has committed crimes against a minor.

The Hawaiian state sex offender registry lists Huberty's Monument home address — which also is the mailing address for Families with a Mission. There is no indication that Huberty has registered as a sex offender in Colorado, as required by state law.

Calls to Huberty's home — where the voice mail has a man named "Paul" saying to leave a message and "God bless you" — were not returned today.

His Hawaiian probation requires him to undergo lie-detector tests and other exams to see if he is sexually aroused by deviant material, according to the Hawaii state court database.

He is ordered to stay off the grounds of Kona Christian Academy, Makia Lani High School and the University of Nations, Kona campus. He was also barred from being a foster parent or guardian of a minor.

While serving with the U.S. Army in Germany in 1996, then-Lt. Col. Paul G. Huberty was convicted of sodomy, indecent acts, and adultery involving a 17-year girl who accompanied Huberty to Europe as his "legal ward," according to federal court records. Huberty was a married father of three at the time.

In the same trial, the 18-year Army veteran was also convicted of "dishonorably fondling his genitals" during an incident involving two Dutch women at a public swimming pool in the Netherlands.

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