Vicar wants to see gay men tattooed?

Guess where a vicar wants gays to get tattooed! If you said on their butts and chins, have a virtual cookie.

Rev. Peter Mullen, an Anglican vicar who serves as rector of St. Michael’s church in Cornhill and St. Sepulchre in London’s financial district, wants all gay men tattooed on their buttocks and chins. According to the vicar, the butt stamp should read “Sodomy can seriously damage your health,” and the chin patch should proclaim “Fellatio kills.”

“It is time that religious believers began to recommend … discouragements of homosexual practices after the style of warnings on cigarette packets,” Mullen, 66, wrote on his blog.

The suggestion evoked comparisons to some freakish combination of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Adolph Hitler’s management of European Jews.

Understandably, gay rights activists were outraged by Mullen’s outburst and demanded his resignation. It’s not the first time the vicar has spewed anti-gay sentiment, gay rights group Stonewall noted: He also publicly has condemned pride events as “obscene” and posted to his blog a poem slamming the wedding of two gay priests performed in a church by a fellow vicar.

Even the Bishop of London was not amused by Mullen’s most recent stunt, calling the suggestion “highly offensive.”

This guy’s off his rocker, that’s for sure. Mullen claims it was satire, all a big joke. He also pulls out the “Some of my best friends are homosexual!” line as proof he was misunderstood.

Balls. He meant what he wrote, I have little doubt of that.

Lest Mullen be mistaken for a common homophobe, however, The Register pointed out the reverend is equally opposed to secularism (“far worse than the threat from international terrorism,” Mullen wrote in an editorial in the Times) and abortion.

Wow. What a shocker.

I suppose he won’t lose his job over it, but at least the Diocese is looking into it. Private blog or not, shouldn’t a person have some sense of decorum? I know people are entitled to their own opinions but we’re living in a world now where opinions go beyond four walls in less than four seconds. I think the more important you are, the more careful you have to be when expressing what you think. Since he’s in a position of authority in his parish, he needs to be a role model for his parish, all of the time. If he can’t lead a morally upstanding life, how can he encourage such a life for his flock?