Catholicism's opposition to contraception

is based not so much on a desire for limitless breeding

as a desire to prevent people from enjoying

the sexual freedom brought by birth control

Every attempt at sexual repression comes from religion

Asian faiths aren't so punitive

They generally accept sex as a natural part of life

Some Hindu temples are covered with statues

of copulating gods and goddesses

Millions of Shiva worshipers pray over

models of his erect penis

Teenage Sex: The Wonder of the World

Sexual repression comes from the conservative Right, especially from America's rigid and pale fundamentalist "core."

Premarital sex is evil. Female sexuality must be, as ever, contained, repressed, shoved deep down lest it tempt men to sin like gleeful pagans licking ice cream from the pierced nipples of the devil.

The superiority of virginity myth, it is a massive, underreported disaster.

It is a ridiculous and exhausting misconception that must be eradicated like a cancer. Perhaps French philosopher Voltaire said it best, nearly 300 years ago:

"It is one of the great superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue." So true.

Which is another way of asking, Don't we have it exactly backward? Shouldn't one's overall happiness -- physical, marital or otherwise -- be directly equated with exceptional amounts of sexual training and education and awareness?

Isn't such positively libidinous education not a recipe for health and well-being?

Girls should know how to handle their own genitalia. Experimental sex should be encouraged from an early age.

Arm your virgin daughters and inept sons with slick and giddy reverence for the joys of the flesh, for its potential to transform and ease tension and make you realize all is not so wrong and sinful and hateful with the world.

Would we not be utterly transformed? Would we not finally be free of the sneering, churlish mentality that somehow thinks virgins are dumb, immaculate prizes to be won? Let's just say it: There is no sacredness in the virgin.

There is only the fear, were she to be educated and empowered and really let loose, of what she could become.

Sex and God: Is Religion Twisted?

"Christian stricture," H.L. Mencken wrote, "is notoriously hard on female sexual gratification."

He was right, of course, and he should have included Jewish endeavor and Muslim endeavor in his observation.

Western religions have spent millenia inflicting shame, guilt, repression and punishment upon human sexuality -- especially upon women's sexuality.

Asian faiths aren't so punitive. They generally accept sex as a natural part of life.

Some Hindu temples are covered with statues of copulating gods and goddesses. Millions of Shiva worshipers pray over models of his erect penis.

Tantric sects practice ritual intercourse.

But the West presents an opposite, ugly story: a long chronicle of religious hostility to sexual pleasure -- for no rational reason.

The Old Testament raged against "whoredom" and decreed brutal penalties for unapproved sex. It commanded that non-virgin brides be stoned to death (Deut. 22:21).

In the first century C.E., Paul urged celibacy for Christians. The earliest known papal decree, issued by Pope Siricius in 386, attempted (without much success) to forbid church elders to make love with their wives.

Scholar Reay Tannahill says early Christian leaders made sex and "sin" synonymous.

"It was Augustine who epitomized a general feeling among the church fathers that the act of intercourse was fundamentally disgusting," she wrote.

"Arnobius called it filthy and degrading, Methodius unseemly, Jerome unclean, Tertullian shameful, Ambrose a defilement."

Christian father Origen of Alexandria reportedly castrated himself in a traumatic display of faith.

When priests oversaw the historic witch hunts -- in which thousands of women were tortured and burned -- church writings reeked of revulsion to female sexuality. A medieval cardinal, Hughes de St. Cher, wrote:

"Woman pollutes the body, drains the resources, kills the soul, uproots the strength, blinds the eye, and embitters the voice.

When Puritans ruled England in the 1600s, death was decreed for adultery.

In late 19th century America, Anthony Comstock and his "Committee for the Suppression of Vice" pursued sex like a hunted animal.

About 2,500 people were convicted on morality charges, and Congress passed the puritanical Comstock Laws.

Margaret Sanger was jailed eight times for advocating birth control. Comstock even led a police raid against an art gallery which dared to display the naively innocent "September Morn" painting.

Until recently, thanks to church pressure, nearly every U.S. state had Old Testament-style laws against "fornication" and "sodomy" and the like.

It wasn't until 1972 that the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled that all American couples have a right to birth control.

The Catholic church's opposition to contraception is based not so much on a desire for limitless breeding as a desire to prevent people from enjoying the sexual freedom brought by birth control.

Today, the church's ability to imprison nonconformists has receded. However, every censorship effort, every attempt at sexual repression, still comes from religion.

North Carolina's 1.2 million Southern Baptists recently voted to shut off their television sets for a day to protest "moral depravity" in shows such as "NYPD Blue," which contains partial nudity and sex.

In 1993, Pope John Paul II declared unmarried sex and birth-control "intrinsically evil." In my city (Charleston, West Virginia), two brave nuns, Patricia Hussey and Barbara Ferraro, battled Catholicism's sexual taboos until they finally were forced out of their order.

They recounted their struggle in a 1990 book, No Turning Back. It says: "The church really hates the idea of people having sex for fun.... There is something prurient and dishonest about the church's loathing for the body."

Sometimes the ministers who rail loudest against "filth" and "pornography" are cloaking their secret sins.

Television evangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker both fell to private sex scandals.

Georgia revivalist Mario Leyva went to prison in 1990 for sodomizing more than 100 church boys, and two assistant pastors likewise were jailed. Numerous such cases appear in the news.

As American clergy endlessly strive to censor sex from public media, an odd contradiction has arisen: Ministers raise little objection to a movie containing 50 murders -- but a glimpse of a woman's nipple brings their wrath.

A popular song commented: "Bullets fly like popcorn on the screen, recommended wholesome, nice and clean. Making love's the thing that can't be seen. Why?"

Using legal language, Congress and state legislatures periodically ponder laws to imprison purveyors of "ultimate sexual acts." In my newspaper, I once asked readers to suggest what might be an ultimate sexual act. A couple in a rubber raft going over Niagara Falls? Two elephants in a china shop?)

* * *

It would probably take an army of psychiatrists and historians to pinpoint all the reasons why Western religion developed such antagonism toward human sexuality. More important is the question:

Is this attitude justified? Are there ethical, rational reasons to support the religious condemnations of normal human desires?

Perhaps the most detailed and insightful answer came from none other than humanist Bertrand Russell, who said a "morbid and unnatural" attitude toward sex is "the worst feature of the Christian religion."

And much of what he said applies with equal force to the other Western religions. He asserted that church aversion to sex is not only unfounded but harmful.

Against the prevailing anti-sex views of religion, he argued that sexual pleasure is a positive good, and that religious objections are based not on reason but on dogma.

But perhaps his most important argument was that religious anti-sexuality attitudes inflict untold human misery, especially on women. He observed:

"Monks have always regarded Woman primarily as the temptress. They have thought of her mainly as the inspirer of impure lusts."

So the church has done "what it could to secure that the only form of sex which it permitted should involve very little pleasure and great deal of pain. The opposition to birth control has, in fact, the same motive."

Strangely, Russell observed, the church doesn't seem to care how miserable its rigid sex laws make people. He cited this example:

"...An inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, 'This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children.'

Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not abolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.

"...The church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering...

"Because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness.

And when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. 'What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.'"

In other words, people are less important to the church than the harsh rules it adopted centuries ago.

Scholar Gerald Larue, author of Sex and the Bible, says: "When biblical sexual taboos serve to produce guilt and deny normal and natural sexual behavior, their influence is toxic."

* * *
Ironically, century after century of holy hostility to sex hasn't dampened humanity's zest for it.

that's in spite of conservative churches claiming sex is "filth" or "intrinsically evil."

Most Westerners have come to regard sex natural and exciting. Sanctimonious strictures suit fewer and fewer people.

The record of the centuries shows clearly that Christianity has always been a haven for the sexually repressed.

Holy Smoke