IT IS a strange experience listening to 200 Anglican bishops arguing about sex, and that is what the leaders of the Episcopal Church did most of this week in Minneapolis.

The election of the steely Canon Gene Robinson as the Anglican Communion’s first openly gay bishop was always going to be a significant scuffle in the war between liberals and conservatives being waged on a number of fronts in America.

The Battle of Minneapolis had all the hallmarks of a British political sex scandal, with priggishness posing as piety, hypocrisy invoked in the name of principle and — manna to the press who had come to witness a schism — an intervention by a man who claimed to have been “inappropriately touched” by the bishop-elect.

As it turned out, the accuser, who soon withdrew the charges, had mistaken the touchy-feely style of today’s Anglican clergy with what Mrs Patrick Campbell called “the hurly-burly of the chaise longue”. A secondary accusation, which would have been dismissed out of hand had the groping charge not set off an inquiry, suggested that a group that the bishop-elect founded to help sexually confused young people had a website that was a click away from hard porn.

The inquiry soon discovered that Canon Robinson had nothing to do with setting up the website or the dirty pictures.

It is worrying to find that a body like the Episcopal Church, with ambitions to change the modern world, knows so little about cyberspace that it has not yet discovered that almost any website is just two clicks away from pornography and there is little that anyone can do about it.

Since John Gray wrote Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, the handy division of the world into those who like to fight and those who prefer to love has been adopted by American political theorists as a simple way to describe everything from America (Mars) versus Europe (Venus) to Southerners (Martians) versus Northerners (Venusians).

A country where the right to bear arms is guaranteed by the Constitution undoubtedly looks to Mars rather than Venus as its guiding planet. You need only look at American entertainment to understand that violence, often on a horrific scale, is acceptable to audiences whereas sex makes them feel uncomfortable. In Europe it is quite the other way round.

Hollywood has celebrated violence from the beginning. The great staple of American cinema until recent years was the western, either graphic accounts of the bloody racial cleansing of the continent by white settlers or the slaughter of violent criminals by their gun-slinging rivals.

In more recent years the western has been supplanted by gangster movies, adding a dimension of inaccurate sophistication to the tacky world of organised crime. However brilliant the dialogue, the Byzantine intrigue is always punctuated by epic scenes of gory assassination or the horrific massacre of rivals.

In the early Hollywood years, sex was unabashed. Stars like Greta Garbo simmered on the screen while Eric von Stroheim relished filming the orgy scenes in risqué pictures such as Foolish Wives. But the decadence of the Twenties provoked a prudish backlash.

In the 1930s the film industry accepted the Hays Code, which insisted that if a man and a woman were seen together on a bed, the man should always have at least one foot on the floor.

In the permissive Sixties, when young Americans promoted making love not war, sex in movies became an instrument of satire rather than titillation. Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice suggested far more in the title than ever appeared on screen.

In the Nineties Boogie Nights, a satirical masterpiece describing the emptiness of the Los Angeles porn industry in the sex-mad Seventies, showed intercourse as a tedious chore.

The rise of cable television promised to release programme-makers from the tyranny of self-censorship demanded by free-to-air television. But while the new licence led to Sex and the City, in which New York women endlessly talk about sex but rarely get into bed, the cable operators have preferred to use their new-found freedom to screen uncut versions of hyper-violent movies.

There are few better indications of the way religion stifles sex while condoning violence than last week’s Episcopal General Convention, which debated gay sex for days while ignoring a moral issue which in Europe would have provoked a march on Washington: the death penalty.

The bishops wasted hours on gay marriage rites but they did not spend a minute drawing attention to the national moral corruption that capital punishment inspires. Martians constantly invoke the first commandment, thou shalt not commit adultery, yet Venusians rarely counter with the sixth, thou shalt not kill.

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