Obsession is a powerful emotion.Obsession with money or people have made people do horrible things they wouldn’t normally do.It is rare such obsessions are a catalyst for good.This applies doubly for the Catholic Church, which claims more than one billion adherents worldwide.The church’s obsession with sex is a cancer that threatens to tear it to pieces.For all the hype, sex isn’t a subject frequently mentioned in the Bible. While the Bible does speak about it sporadically, it tends to focus more on tenets of compassion, love and faith.Yet, for some reason, the Catholic Church can’t get enough of sex.They preach against premarital sex, adultery, homosexuality and birth control. Ask any devotee, and he or she will tell you they’ve heard warnings about each one in church.Yet, sometimes it’s hard to take these teachings seriously from the Catholic Church.It all sounds a bit hypocritical coming from an organization which saw some leaders rape the most innocent of beings and others use hush money to keep these deplorable acts from the public.The best way to describe the church’s relationship with sex is to compare it with how some treat alcohol.The two types of people most obsessed with alcohol are the heaviest of alcoholics and the most pious of non-drinkers.The church manages to play both roles at the same time. They preach abstinence and self-restraint, but church leadership fails miserably in practicing such teachings.This obsession recently threatened to fully destroy any positive feelings the public has left after countless headlines about systematic rape, abuse and corruption within the church.A few weeks ago, the church threatened to stop providing any sort of social services to the poor and homeless within the District of Columbia, simply because the city council appears ready to approve an ordinance allowing gay marriage within the district.With this threat, the Catholic Church is whole-heartedly threatening the council and its D.C. constituents over something as silly as gay marriage.A reasonable person would ask why the church is so dead set on this ordinance.Church leadership will tell you the measure would rob him or her of espousing core parts of their beliefs. This is pure fantasy.The law is rather generous to religious organizations. It does not force them to recognize same-sex marriage nor force them to provide space or services for these marriages. But the law does force the churches to provide benefits to same-sex spouses though.I can fully appreciate wariness to gay marriage. Opposing same-sex marriage for religious reasons is by no means a form of bigotry. Yet, denying social services provided to the neediest of people over employment benefits is woefully negligent.This isn’t the only example of the church’s obsession with sex.The Catholic Church is one of the world’s largest providers of HIV/AIDS treatment to those stricken with it in Africa. But the church also condemns millions of Africans to death by the way it provides care. The church provides aid on the condition that abstinence is promoted as the way to prevent the spread of disease.No one denies someone who refrains from having sex drops his or her chances of contracting disease considerably. The problem is that abstinence is just not a valid means of preventing the disease.The church is so dead set in its ways that the Pope actually said condoms “aggravate the problems” of combating the disease.That statement is, at best, horribly ignorant and, at worst, shockingly sinister.The church desperately needs to end its obsession with sex or risk losing further ground in the court of public opinion. Stephen Schmitz is a 19-year-old mass communication sophomore from The Woodlands, Texas.—-Contact Stephen Schmitz at [email protected]