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By Lloyd Grove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 23, 2001; Page C03

With members of his Imani Temple still seething over his implied criticism of black wives last week as he prepared to marry a young Japanese woman handpicked by Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, Archbishop George A. Stallings Jr. defended his plans yesterday by comparing his fiancee's ethnicity with that of Washington PR executive Linda Greene, the longtime companion he abruptly dumped to wed 24-year-old Sayomi Kamimoto.

The Post's Hamil R. Harris reports that the 53-year-old defrocked Catholic priest ・who was excommunicated after forming a breakaway religious movement, the African American Catholic Congregation, in 1989 ・issued a statement that said in part: "I want to make it clear for the record that marriage to a woman of color who is not African American is a personal decision and not a public statement. If I had married Miss Linda Greene, some in the black community would not be up in arms, yet she, too, is a non-African American of Asian and Indian descent."

The 49-year-old Greene ・who was among several female Imani Temple members who walked out of Stallings's Mass on Sunday to protest what they called his "close affiliation with and adoption of doctrine of the Unification Church" ・disputed Stallings's characterization. "Good Lord!" she told us yesterday. "I don't think I should comment except to say that I am African American. I have not a clue why he's saying this. I knew George Stallings well, but this new person I truly don't know."

Stallings's troubles started last week after Greene preemptively announced her ex's nuptials; he compounded his problems by telling us, "I've been plagued by women scorned," and then made things even worse by explaining to the Afro-American newspaper: "I chose a Japanese wife because . . . they are dedicated to their husbands, they are gentle and they work with them." He added that he didn't want a wife "who desired to party all the time."

Yesterday, as Stallings dodged grenades hurled by his own flock, the Unification Church sent in reinforcements. The Rev. Michael Jenkins, Moon's top church official in North America, told Harris that Stallings's engagement to Kamimoto is the result of genuine love, not an arbitrary union orchestrated by the Korean. "We are confident of Bishop Stallings's integrity and purity as a man of God," said Jenkins. "The allegations against Bishop Stallings have been proven false." Jenkins said that starting tonight Stallings will hold a three-day revival at Imani Temple sponsored by the Unification Church, and that on Sunday he will say his marriage vows along with 40 other couples at the New York Hilton. "This is a definitely a beautiful love story," Jenkins said. "I don't think it can get better than this."

Curtis: Some of her fans are barely out of diapers. (Art Streiber)

Jamie Lee Curtis claims she's not a sexy screen siren anymore. "My constituency has changed from drooling teenage boys to drooling 4-year-olds," she told us.

The 42-year-old movie star, who will attend this morning's Congressional Breakfast to tout a nationwide program to keep kids safe and locate missing children, spends much of her time mothering the teenage daughter and young boy she raises with her husband, comic actor Christopher Guest. But she told us: "My primary purpose as a public person is writing children's books" ・four bestsellers since 1993, including her latest, "Where Do Balloons Go? An Uplifting Mystery."

Then there's her gig as a paid spokeswoman for the Ford Blue Oval Certified Dealers "Commitment to Kids" effort. Starting Friday, designated dealerships will be offering free snapshots, fingerprinting and safety ID booklets to register kids in the program. "Every parent has had that moment of fear . . . where for that fraction of a second you have lost contact with your child," Curtis told us from Vancouver, B.C., where she was filming a movie she declined to identify. "So you take every precaution."

The daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, Curtis also happens to be titled aristocracy. In Britain, she's known as Baroness Haden-Guest of Saling, an honorific she picked up in 1996 when her father-in-law died and her husband became Lord Haden-Guest. But being a mom "has given me the most pleasure I've ever had," she said. "Life is clicking on all cylinders."

Not that she doesn't have concerns. "The last thing I need to be doing is slagging off the current administration," she told us, "but I think their environmental policy stinks and they should be ashamed of themselves."

What foul scheme was afoot when third-party presidential candidate Ralph Nader hopped out of a cab on Capitol Hill yesterday morning and slipped into the Republican National Committee building? It turns out, as Nader told us a few hours later, that he was a featured speaker (on agriculture, of all things) at a public policy seminar for career civil servants being held in a leased meeting room at GOP headquarters. Did Nader find time to conspire with Republicans? "I did not," he assured us.

After a 2½-hour tete-a-tete over dinner Monday at Jeffrey's at the Watergate, President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and President Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, were spotted meticulously examining the bill and dividing up the charges. For the record, both started with the asparagus cucumber soup ($9.75), Rice had the herb-crusted sea bass ($26) and Albright had the roasted French hen ($19), and finally Rice ordered the cappuccino creme brulee ($8.50) and Albright ate the "chocolate intemperance" gold-dusted berries ($9). No word on who tipped what.

With Beth Berselli