What role should religion play in shaping the broader moral ethos around sex and sexuality today?

Your question would certainly inspire a large variety of answers, and those answers would doubtless be dependent on the religious background of the individual answering the question. As a secularist, I personally would say that while examining religious opinion around sex and sexuality is valuable, it is vital to consider the experience of the post-global age when developing an ethical framework for approaching sexuality. We should not rely on religion to inform the broader ethos, but instead use religion as a tool for cultural examination.

Judeo-Christian traditions are particularly negative when dealing with questions of sexuality. Famously, Leviticus 18:22 is often interpreted as a prohibition of same-sex relations between men. This passage, supported by a few others, provides the moral framework that has led to the oppression of the queer community in the past century, and has instigated violence as well as inspired legislation aimed at restricting the rights and freedoms of that community. This framework is also responsible for the transphobic legislation that has been garnering so much recent attention in North Carolina.

Transphobia is concerned more with gender politics than sexual politics, but the two are intrinsically linked. Not all religious traditions are as negative as the Judeo-Christian traditions. In India's Hinduism, the existence of the hijra, or the non-binary gender, has long been acknowledged. The hijra holds a privileged place in the caste system, and sexual liaisons with the hijra were a spiritual practice. Many North American indigenous peoples recognized and permitted non-heteronormative behaviors as well; one 18th-century explorer reported homosexual activities in the indigenous Californian populations.

Religion can help us to inform our understanding of sex and sexuality, and give us a glimpse into the sexual practices of our forbearers; but we must view these teachings through the lens of the cultural anthropologist to construct a moral and ethical framework to approach these issues, as the religious traditions can be used as a political tool to malign portions of the population. If we as a culture utilize ancient teachings to attempt to construct an ethos for dealing with modern sexual practices, we affect the lives and livelihoods of very real members of our community, possibly condemning them for practices that are private and harmless to begin with.