When Pope Gregory the Great first considered the seven deadly sins in the 6th century, he chose to place them in a hierarchy. Pride led the way, then Envy, Anger, Sadness, Avarice and Gluttony. Lust he placed last. It was, he believed, the least offensive crime against Love.
In the years since, the list has shifted. Given its dangers to Scotland's heart and soul, Gluttony seems a more deserving enemy, along with Sadness replacing Sloth. Yet the true boss sin is revealed in the Catholic church's obsession with one subject above all others. 'The Catholic church ... remains ready to collaborate with all relevant agencies in enhancing Scotland's sexual health,' said Cardinal Keith Patrick O'Brien last week.
As an adult, you venture into the world of teenage sex with your credentials bared if you want to emerge alive. Into these dark corners full of embarrassment, paranoia and hormones crowd the terrified parents, weary teachers, struggling social workers and, most vocally, appalled priests. Once in a while, nervous politicians have to get involved, too.
In Scotland, cases of the sexually transmitted disease chlamydia in the under-25s have risen by 39 per cent to 9,066 in a year. More worryingly, five times as many 15- to 19-year-olds fall pregnant here than in the Netherlands, and three times more than in France. This is the sort of problem that the society-reforming Jack McConnell would have wrestled with if the executive hadn't already been on to it several years before he became First Minister.
Yet here a politician can catch hell faster than a Scottish teenager can catch an STD. Earlier this year, O'Brien called the executive's draft proposals 'state-sponsored sexual abuse'.
Only 4 per cent of the responses to the government's consultation document came from 'faith-based' organisations, but their power showed when health minister Andy Kerr finally revealed his strategy last week. 'Abstinence plus' he called it. It's in the 'plus' that the politicians get to do what they think is necessary.
A well set-out timetable now orders sex education. When children are still at primary school, the lessons are on family relationships and what it means to care for one another. Sex education only becomes explicit as children get older. The key new detail, though, is that schools will have to show they are offering information about sexual health services and letting the pupils know how to find them.
None of this seems particularly controversial but the Catholic church continues to be very unhappy. 'There remain areas of the strategy which cannot be reconciled with the views of the Catholic church,' said O'Brien. He is worried that a teacher will refer a student to a doctor who will prescribe the morning-after pill, all without the knowledge of the parent.
The church loves abstinence. It wants parental knowledge partly because of its love of family, but also so that it can sow fear. Fear of Hell, but, more pertinently, of society's censure is its bulwark against savage passions. For all the talk of the joy of waiting for Mr or Mrs Right, it's the videos of aborted foetuses, the denial of a condom's complete protection and the detailing of the horrors of STDs that so many abstemious churches rely on.
At first glance, perhaps they have a point. It doesn't take much time in a former communist state (or even a current one) to see that the suppression of religious teachings coincides with a massive rise in sexual irresponsibility and the use of abortion as a form of contraception.
But it wasn't godlessness that led to the problems faced by the communist countries. It was the lack of control. If you give someone a house, a job, food, yet no hope for betterment and no way of planning for the family's future, then there's little else to do than behave with abandon.
Whatever the church says, there is only one thing a teenager betrays if he or she (and obviously it weighs far heavier if it is a she) gets sex wrong and that's her future. The church, the state, and the family can come up with as many moral and theological reasons for behaving in a certain way, but in the end it is the future that is squandered. And far fewer individuals would squander their future if they had one.
It hardly needs pointing out that the teenage pregnancy figures leap as you head into Scotland's poorer neighbourhoods. Teenagers in deprived areas are three times as likely to fall pregnant as those in wealthier areas. In Dundee, the teenage pregnancy rate jumps to being twice the national average.
So while sex education is important, it is education itself, in English, physics, maths and, perhaps, even moral philosophy that will bring down these figures. That, and a glimpse of a hopeful future.
The state, the church and the family are about securing that future. They all exist so that we can go forward, raising children if we choose to, in a secure world. Should a parent be informed if teacher sends a child to a doctor who then prescribes the morning-after pill? This equation involves three of the core professions in society. We have to seek the ideal; the answer lies in whatever is best for that individual child.
It is well-informed children, with a hope for the future, who will reduce these problems. What God thinks doesn't really matter.
