Few religion-column topics are more guaranteed to offend than sex. I probably needn’t go any further. Merely seeing the word in print has surely offended someone already. That squeamishness is a good place to begin.
Negative views of sexuality in Western Christendom go back at least as far as Augustine, who reacted to his own, youthful transgressions with a Manichaean starkness that filtered into Latin positions on the topic and impacted doctrines as wide-ranging as original sin, clerical celibacy and birth control.
