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FWIW, most churches I've attended view sex as a good thing: the most intimate of acts, reserved for the union of marriage. Sex is not sin, or even close to it; using it for the wrong purposes is. [...] I realize that there are some Christians who've regarded sex as necessary only for the bearing of children, but this is VERY hard to support from the perspective of the bible. What I (and most Christians I know) come away with is that God intended sex to build/show intimacy between marital partners in a unique and special way.

Hm, then I must have been too exposed to those some Christian (but then, I am here surrounded by Catholics... )

This almost makes sense: if we take the formal marriage as the only way of expresing commitment between partners, and given that sex was until recently more or less inevitably leading to pregnancy, limiting sex to married couples is not entirely unreasonable.

But then, I don't think that commitment equals marriage, in either direction, so for me one of two premises does not hold. Contraception removes the other.

You are right, it is prevention of "sex for wrong purposes" or in "wrong circumstances", so we get everything from Ashcroft covering sculpture of Justice and that stupid uproar over equaly stupid Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" stunt, to fundamentalist Jews in Jerusalem calling their American guests "Nazis" for women and men praying together at the Wailing Wall, to burqhas and Talibans stoning women for infractions they were not even aware of.

I wanted to go on about women being threated as father's (or brother's) then husband's propetry, non-virgins being 'damaged goods' (even if being raped and even now) etc, but somehow I have trouble puting it clearly. Some other time.