You have to love those whacky U.S. Bishops. This header/subhead combo in this morning’s New York Times made me laugh out loud in the campus coffee shop where I was eating a bagel.

U.S. Bishops Adopt Guidelines on Gays

Urging celibacy for gay men and lesbians, and rejecting artificial contraception

Hm. Celibacy. Doesn’t the Catholic Church in the United States have a wee credibility problem where celibacy is concerned? Considering the inability of the Catholic Church to keep its own priests celibate, I don’t think think the sour-faced U.S. Bishops seen above are really going to have much luck with rank-and-file gay and lesbian Catholics, to say nothing of gay and lesbian non-Catholics.

Like most gay and lesbian readers of the New York Times, seeing today’s headline about the U.S. Bishops’ unwelcome, unsolicited plans for my life (loneliness, misery, and lifetime of sexual frustration—where do I sign?!), only reminded me of this headline from yesterday’s NYT:

New York Priest’s Sex-Abuse Trial Begins, in Pennsylvania

Celibacy? Get your priests to honor their own vows of celibacy and then maybe—maybe—we’ll consider contemplating your advice for us. (We’ll still reject it, of course, but we’ll contemplate it.) Until that blessed day arrives, well, let’s just say my first impulse on reading the story in the New York Times today was not to call my boyfriend and break up. I laughed—and not just at your proscriptions for gays and lesbians.

The guidelines welcome gay people, but they also affirm church teachings that “homosexual inclinationsâ€� are inherently disordered. While having such inclinations is not sinful, gay sexual activity is, according to the core teachings. The guidelines, called “Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination,â€� passed by a vote of 194 to 37. They also speak out against same-sex marriage and adoptions by gay men and lesbians….

The bishops also adopted “Married Love and the Gift of Life,â€� which is meant to explain church teachings about contraception for engaged and young married couples.

The document asserts that artificial contraception introduces a “false noteâ€� into a marriage and has led to a decline in respect for life in society. Catholics use birth control to the same extent as other Americans; only 4 percent, the document said, use natural planning, the type of birth control backed by the church.

Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kan., said on Monday that gay Catholics who are not celibate and married Catholics who use artificial contraception should not receive Holy Communion.

Wow! How can I ever thank you guys enough for linking your sex-phobic, ill-informed, thoroughly-backwards and completely idiotic gay bashing with your equally sex-phobic, ill-informed, thoroughly-backwards straight bashing? By tackling both issues at once, by linking homosexual activity and heterosexual activity like this, you all have demonstrate that your issue isn’t really with homosexual sex, per se, but sex, period. And, I’m sorry, but your credibility on contraception isn’t much better than your cred on gay sex. Ask the average straight American Catholic what a priest might recommend as a birth control method and you’re likely to hear, “Come on the altar boy, not in him.”

And did you catch that, U.S. Bishops? Only 4% of straight married Catholics use “natural planning.” Do you really intend to deny Communion to 96% of American Catholics? Are you double agents working on behalf of the Lutheran Church or what? Are you trying to make Protestants of us all?

And speaking of “natural planning,” I guess the U.S. Bishops missed the big news about how many fertilized eggs—you know, human beings with souls and shit—wind up dying as a result of “natural family planning.” Also from the NYT:

A philosopher in Britain has ruffled feathers on both sides of the Atlantic by suggesting that the rhythm method of contraception may increase the risk of early embryonic death.

Luc Bovens, a philosopher at the London School of Economics, argues in the Journal of Medical Ethics that couples who try to prevent pregnancy by avoiding sex during the woman’s most fertile time of month may be more likely to produce embryos that do not develop or implant in the womb.

If this is correct, he writes, then “millions of rhythm method cycles per year globally depend for their success on massive embryonic death.”