Grey_Wolf_Leader

Actually, it's not really fair to the Puritans that we use their name as a term for "unhealthy, repressive shaming" tactics. If you study the Puritans closely, many of whom were ancestors of Joseph Smith, you realize that their beliefs are nothing like what people portray them. In fact, one particular Puritan preacher was well known in his time for his sermons which lauded marital sexuality. That could hardly be considered repressive. Part of the problem may be that parents simply don't perform as effective a job as they should--or fail their job completely by refusing to talk about it in the first place--and then people expect some outside authority, whether it be public schools, the culture, or the Church, to bear the responsible instead of the parents. You are most certainly right that many churches from the Catholics to the Baptists and Evangelicals share our belief in the value of Chastity and proclaim it. But there are many "socially progressive" liberal churches out there who claim to be Christan and side with the boys in power: the secularists in academia and the media who pretty much control our society as well as what we see and hear in the culture. It's not exactly a fair game when only one side's pinching the ear of the referee.

Thank you very much everyone for your insightful contributions. Honestly, I thought that this subject might be a little too serious and heavy and that I might actually get banned for it, and only on my very first post too! That is definitely a good answer. I recall that the restored gospel points out Lucifer doesn't have a body. So, part of his ill-intentions towards all of us, his spirit siblings who chose to follow God and not him, those of us who got bodies for keeping our first estate as a reward for our loyalty, may be something of an inferiority complex. He's jealous and covetous of our sacred gift. The inheritance that we got and he didn't. And thus the first item on his agenda would naturally be to vandalize and ruin that gift. It's kind of like how a really jealous brother would like to take his rival sibling's fancy new sports car on a destructive joy-ride.

Over the past few years I have been wandering the internet gobbling up information as I go like Pac-Man, and a few months ago I hit upon the search term "Mormon Sexuality" in Google's recommended searches list. I hit enter and up came a looooonnnngg list of various sites. A select few were positive, like ones about feminine sexuality via popular LDS therapists, doctors, counselors, and authors like Jennifer Finlayson-Fife or Laura M. Brotherson. The vast majority however were either supposed "Mormon Hidden History" exposure sites with pages on our sexual beliefs [all portraying them in the most negative light possible], ex-Mormon rant sites, and a few secular journalistic pieces with obviously dismissive and irreverently tones on Mormon sexual beliefs. The words which appeared in these results were surprisingly consistent. Terms like, "repression", "self-hate", "shame", "social conditioning", et cetera, et cetera kept popping up. There were even a couple of sites with members who claimed to be LDS, but whose writings clearly left nothing to imagination that they did not practice the Law of Chastity. As a deeply intellectual person, I have long studied my religion and have tried to build a complete, encompassing, and yet simplified personal concept map which lays out my beliefs and how they interrelate, especially in contrast to the modern secular world. And I see little but open hostility in the Western World towards the very idea that you shouldn't have sex whenever you want, without regard to whether you are married, or even for whomever your partner is. What are your thoughts? Why do you think people dislike Chastity so much? (Aside from the obvious "gets in the way of fun" part I mean).