By Gary Barlow

Sinners and saints

Roman Catholic Archbishop George Niederauer of San Francisco was in full spin mode last week, saying he didn’t realize he was giving communion to two members of a GLBT group that specializes in satire, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, at an Oct. 7 mass.

OK, first, the archbishop was celebrating mass in the Castro district at what may be the gayest Catholic church in the world—well, outside of St. Peter’s in Rome, that is, which is full of priests.

Second, the Sisters weren’t exactly inconspicuous. After all, they wore outrageous habits and painted their faces. One even sported an elaborate rainbow-colored feather boa.

So Niederaeur gave them communion and that should have been the end of it. Since then, however, an anti-gay Catholic group posted video of the service online and blasted the archbishop. Then Blowhard Bill O’Reilly got into the act, calling the Sisters a “militant homosexual group.” Um, Bill, feather boas are hardly the weapons of choice for most “militant” groups.

Anyway, now the archbishop is apologizing, quite possibly the first time ever that a Catholic priest has characterized letting sinners partake in communion as a “mistake.”

Funny—I thought welcoming sinners is what it’s supposed to be all about.

Morals charges

Another group that’s maybe a bit touchy about the gay thing, the U.S. military, got all bent out of shape last week when it discovered that its recruiting ads were running on a popular gay website.

USA Today first reported Oct. 18 that ads for several branches of the military were running on GLEE.com. “GLEE” stands for “Gay, Lesbian and Everyone Else” and hosts chat rooms and other services for gays.

As you might know, the U.S. military doesn’t allow openly gay soldiers because…well, they just don’t.

By late that same day the ads had been removed because, said an Army spokesman, GLEE.com doesn’t “meet the moral standards” required by the military.

I know—they have to be kidding, right? I mean this is an outfit that’s so desperate for fresh recruits to send to Iraq that they’re letting convicted criminals in. In fact, more than 11 percent of the Army’s recruits last year were given “moral character waivers” to excuse criminal offenses, including felony charges.

Does anyone else think the military’s concept of “moral” is a little askew?

Having sex God’s way

Another set of people who might be on the wrong page when it comes to judging what’s “moral” are the folks in charge of Topeka High School in Kansas.

School officials there said last week that they terminated a program to give free condoms to students after a newspaper disclosed the program Oct. 16. The school’s principal claimed he had received only “cursory” information about the program prior to the Topeka Capital-Journal’s inquiries about it and said he just thought it was an “AIDS awareness project.”

It’s not like it was ever running at top speed anyway. After all, the Topeka AIDS Project had given the school just 100 free condoms in September and another 100 this month. School officials said the condoms were scooped up by students in less than a week each month.

The school’s booster club president was outraged that students were getting condoms at school.

“You are removing parents from the picture,” she said.

Well, you can rest easy now, dear, safe in the knowledge that your teenagers are back to having sex without condoms, just like God intended.

More than brotherly love

Of course, over the past weekend, people in Topeka evidently weren’t looking for condoms nearly as often as people in Philadelphia.

That’s right, folks in the City of Brotherly Love searched for condoms on Google more than people anywhere else in the U.S. last weekend. Curiously, Irvine, Calif., came in second on that list. Of course, neither city made the top of the condom search rankings—that honor went to Delhi, India, which is good since they don’t really need to be making more babies there.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t people afraid of making babies who were looking for condoms last weekend in Philly. That’s because at the very same time Philadelphia ranked at the top of the list for Google searches for condoms in the U.S., it also was No. 1 in searches for “gay men.”

I kid you not.

Kind of makes you wonder what you missed in Philadelphia last Saturday, doesn’t it, boys?