conservative

• • Freud believed that traditional Christian attitudes towards sex resulted in a feeling of shame about sexual desire which led to unhealthy repression and mental illness.
• •  Augustine’s insistence that there is something shameful about lust is absurd and pointless once you understand it is the result of evolution, not original sin. Conservative religious attitudes towards sex are therefore unnecessarily repressive and puritanical. They become an unhealthy and pointless obsession with self-control borne from insecurity over a mythical fall from grace.
• • Christianity’s repression of sexual desire made more sense in ancient times when humans were more animalistic, less socialised, less domesticated. 
  • Strict laws and harsh penalties might have been needed then, because humans were less self-controlled and thus needed greater external pressures to keep them behaving adequately.
• our nature is not cursed with original sin such that we need draconian sexual norms and legislation
• Traditionalists always fought against the sexual liberalisation of society, concerned it would harm social order, and yet society seems fine if not better
• • Catholics/natural law would argue that God designed human life to be lived a certain way, and if you upset that balance you cause social problems.21st century youth culture is sexualised to a degree many Christians find concerning.
• • evaluating a personal intimate act into a superficial sign of social status harms people psychologically.
• •  Sex is commodified and people feel pressured into it. They obsess unhealthily about their physical appearance. This is harmful, and makes creating meaningful relationships difficult
• Bishop Barron develops this point, arguing that secular culture’s attitude towards sex is that there is an ‘almost complete lack’ of reference to the moral and ethical setting for sex, the purpose and meaning of sex
• This encourages a self-interested ego disconnected from external objective good which thereby turns inward and cares only about itself in a self-absorbed and finally destructive way.
• Stephen Fry, a gay writer and broadcaster, argues that the paedophile priest scandal can be explained by the Church’s repressive attitude towards sex, pointing to “the twisted, neurotic and hysterical way that [the Church] leaders are chosen; the celibacy, the nuns, the monks the priesthood. This is not natural and normal.”
• • Fry is suggesting that the unhealthy sexual repressiveness of Church teachings causes its priests to become sexually perverted. Fry is applying the theory of Freud and Nietzsche – that repression of desires can be unhealthy as they can erupt out in negative ways.