While America frets about the bedroom activities of its leaders, many young adults across the country and across traditions agonize--most often in silence--about navigating romance and sex in a way that doesn't leave them alienated, even rejected, by their faith. Once a child hits puberty, and sometimes even well before, she is often slammed with the (mostly) don'ts of her tradition's teachings about sex, often in a form that is much like chicken soup (so thin as to lack any nourishment at all), and often in a way that if she learns anything about her current sexual predicament, the takeaway involves how she stands to lose everything--her relationship with God, her standing in her community, the respect of a future spouse--if she should commit sexual transgressions before marriage.

Or if she doesn't receive such extensive scare tactics, sometimes adult "mentors" feel a simple Nike-esque "Don't do it" suffices. (That was about all I got as a Catholic young adult.)

For the most part, a young person can either take it or leave it when it comes to teachings on sex by their religious tradition--and more often than not, they face "leaving it," or at least "compartmentalizing it," if they want their faith lives to weather the storm of adolescence, college, and often a decade or more afterward.

So debating whether or not sex outside of marriage is "OK" in the face of a few particular scandals seems disingenuous to me, beside the point even, when the vast majority of our youth are faced with navigating the waters of sex outside of marriage without much if any of the real heavy-lifting of this difficult task done with the help of adults in their community.

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