I’m very much an agreement here with your article which is much in line with things I’ve written about in the past regarding the Evangelical and other conservative Christian worlds.

When all sexuality is reduced to pathology except within certain strict limits within marriage, then the definitions of true pathology, of abusive sexual behavior, begin to blur.

For example, I’ve written about Catholic seminaries in which consensual sex between young men in their twenties was discussed and punished in exactly the same way as sex between 20-something-year-old seminarians and young boys of 12 or 13.

The men who headed the seminaries seemed incapable of morally distinguishing between the two types of behavior.

I believe this lack of distinction has the effect not of creating a culture in which sexual abuse is less likely, but one in which sexual abuse becomes a more casual and expected “sin” to be forgiven in the ordinary pursuit of life.