Last year, Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin campaigned around red-meat family values and traditional morality, and so the pregnancy of her unmarried teenage daughter Bristol proved a little awkward. So, in February, Bristol gave an interview to clear up the matter. For the most part, she cleaved to the party line. Of course, she and her boyfriend Levi were going to get married; yes, avoiding s-x before marriage was best. Then, in a momentary divergence from the script, she blurted out that teaching abstinence-only s-x advice to teens “was not realistic at all”.

The Pope might take note. If abstinence doesn’t work for a privileged family like the Palins in the richest country in the world, how’s it going to pan out in Africa, where 28 per cent of children have lost one or both parents to AIDS? In the context of the epidemic sweeping the continent, slipping-up leaves you not a little bit pregnant but a little bit dead.

As it happens, the comparison between Benedict XVI and the Palins isn’t so fanciful. As Andrew Sullivan points out, the Pope’s prescription for Africa mirrors the official US line — and for very similar reasons. The Bush Administration, in which all policies were half Keystone Cops, half Book of Revelations, reliably lent its support to those African leaders most opposed to condoms and to gays.

Now, to non-believers, the religious preoccupation with s-x seems one of the strangest aspects of the whole faith business.

Take homos-xuality. There’s only eight references to it in the whole Bible and most of them come from the wacky chapters that no-one really reads. Why, for instance, uphold Leviticus 18:22 on the abomination of homos-xuality while ignoring Leviticus 11:9-12 on the equally abominable shellfish? In any case, Scripture contains hundreds of explicit condemnations of wealth (rich man, camel, needle, etc), yet somehow the devout never seem as uncomfortable around millionaires as they do around drag queens.

But such arguments only get you so far, since beyond a certain point you can’t really debate religion.

A weeks back, Miranda Devine defended the ouster of liberal priest Peter Kennedy (yes, it was, at least in part, about sex again) from his Brisbane parish on the basis that Catholicism is a kind of private club. There’s rules, you see — and if you don’t like them, start your own damn church.

In a way, she’s correct. By their nature, religious doctrines aren’t susceptible to argument. There’s no chemical test that will challenge believers’ faith that wine and bread really do transform into the blood and body of Christ — either you accept it or you don’t.

But there’s a difference between private belief and public policy.

Recently, in Brazil, a regional archbishop recently excommunicated the mother and the doctors of a 9-year-old rape victim for aborting the fetus she was carrying, an excommunication later defended by a senior Vatican official. What will be the consequences for a country in which the Church is a mass organisation? Quite obviously, abortions for victims of s-xual assault will become harder to procure — and that’s something that will effect believers and non-believers alike.

It’s the same in Africa. The Pope’s entitled to hold whatever ideas he wants but the availability of condoms is not a question of private conscience. When Benedict starts up on such topics, world leaders have both a right and an obligation to argue against him. If they don’t, millions will die.

Oh, and Bristol Palin popped up in the news again last week. Why? Predictably enough, she and her boyfriend Levi are now kaput.