Is your priest gay?

Yes friends, it has come to this. As John Aravosis writes at Americablog:

"the Vatican is now making clear that the sexual tension a normal adult feels in the company of other adults leads those normal adults to want to rape small children, sometimes as young as 4 years of age."

Say what? Sounds more to me like the problem (according to their own flawed reasoning) is celibacy, not whether the priest is gay or bisexual.

But this being the vatican, it gets better. (Oh yes, there certainly is more.)

As reported this week, investigators will be visiting all US catholic seminaries looking for "evidence of homosexuality." OK, boys, better hide the moisturizer, broadway cast albums and Cher posters quick. And calling your faculty advisor "girlfriend" is probably a career-limiting move.

But over at The Huffington Post, Nicholas von Hoffman reports:

"Some Catholic clergymen are expressing qualms. They wonder how the investigators are going to know who is and who isn't under the new Vatican do-ask-maybe-they'll-tell policy."

Well, duh! Like a group of old men with their feet firmly planted in the 15th century is gonna have a clue how to sniff out 21st century homos.

But this is where we can all do our civic duty. (And you don't even have to be catholic!) That's right, folks, let's all help the pope with his new witch hunt by playing that wonderful new game, "Is your priest gay?" Our panel of experts (meaning me and my roomate's cat) have assembled a list of questions to help cleanse the church (and hence our neighborhoods) of this horrible scourge. Just fill out this helpful questionnaire (or ask your catholic friends to help) and forward it to the vatican's Office of the Inquisition (OK, they call it something else now, but it's the same thing--it'll get there, trust me).

1. Does your priest hang out with men who wear dresses?
   
2. Do his vestments look like they came from "Our Lady of the Showgirls"?
   
3. Has he complained that the pulpit lighting makes him look fat?
   
4. Is he overly fond of sprinkling his homilies with references to David and Jonathan and the disciple that Jesus loved?
   
5. Does he take more than half an hour in the vestry getting ready for mass?
   
6. When complementing ladies on their frocks, does he ever say "honey, wherever DID you find that divine outfit"?
   
7. Does he spend more time at the gym than he does on his homilies?
   
8. Have you often heard him remark about how much he loves cruising, but you know damn well he gets seasick, can't swim and is deathly afraid of the water?
   
9. After moving into the rectory, was installing vertical blinds the first thing he did?
   
10. And did he complain that the medicine cabinet was too small for his skin care regimen?
    

We must be vigilant! We need to root out this cancer that is infecting the church and our communities. Then all that will remain is to decide what to do with all the thousands of empty churches that will be closed because they have no priests left after they finish with this hare-brained scheme!

Of course I'm being satirical. But they're not. These fools think that a) this will do something to help the problem, and b) it has a chance of working.

Americablog sums it up well:

"I'm just trying to understand why a presumably normal adult man like Razzi assumes that of course adult males to want to rape small children simply because they're in the company other adults who may, or may not, turn them on.

Those kind of bizarre assumptions shed a lot of light on why the Catholic church leaderhship has coddled and enabled these pedophiles for decades. They appear to think just like them."

Of course, the title of my diary was rhetorical. Because the answer is "probably"!

Let the witch hunt begin.