Thanks for your post, Mad Dawg! It's nice to hear the perspective of someone who's actually been in the position of offering (or refusing) the Eucharist to the laity.
I think he flinched under fire. Not the end of the world.
This could be. The priest could also be in sympathy to some degree with the protestor or whatever you call these guys. It's hard to tell these days.
Fervently do we pray, "lead me not into temptation," in the sense of a trial, a "kairos", a situation where what I do really matters. It's like all of us, I guess. We want to be important and to do important things, but the moral weight of importance is very heavy.
Administering the Sacrament (or what one thinks is the Sacrament) is a very intense and moving thing to do. Presiding at the Liturgy is, well, similar to saying the Rosary in the sense that there's a kind of unnoticed peeling away of defenses, a silencing of the chattering monkey-mind which is always saying "What's this? What's that? Look at that! What do you think of this? Wow, my butt itches!" It's hard to believe or accept, but one can spend a lot of energy presiding at the Liturgy.
So I can imagine that if suddenly I looked up and saw a guy heavily made up and dressed as a nun, I would really be thrown off balance for a second or two or twelve.
I'm not excusing, just describing, or trying to.
There's also a sense that while I might have been addressed as "Father", I'm not your mommy. What I mean is that in my preaching and teaching I might have addressed dispositions in which one ought not to present oneself for the Sacrament, and I might have said that if you think or do such and such a thing, you are playing with fire if you come to receive, and bad stuff may -- almost certainly will -- happen. But, once I've read them the warning label, tried to explain it, tried to convey the gravity of abusing this sip of wine and this piece of wafer, I felt it was up to them.
In the Pepsicola Church, scandal was pretty much a sine qua non of excommunication or denying the sacrament. This was true in theory, at least. In practice it was already pretty much "Y'all come on down!" and at a recent Pepsicola funeral the priest didn't even put up Baptism as a condition of reception. (Wow, am I glad I left!)
In other words, if you are a notorious evil liver - with the notoriety being an important part, then there's grounds to excommunicate you. It's not so much punitive or "medicinal" for the individual as it is a matter of confirming to the others that this or that behavior or teaching is unacceptable.