Sex please. We're a tabloid.

Anyone paying close enough attention to Georgia's tragicomic "runaway bride" fiasco should have seen this coming. The New York Post is now reporting that the missing-now-found, kidnapped-not-kidnapped, cold-feet-suffering, heroine/villainess of Duluth Georgia Jennifer Wilbanks vanished four days prior to her scheduled wedding because...
because...
She and her fiance John Mason hadn't been having sex!
There! I said it.
Last Thursday, when Jennifer's family pastor Tom Smiley read an apology from her to everyone involved in her story, the statement alluded to "issues" that pushed her out of control.
The Post quotes persons it describes as "friends" of John and Jennifer who say the fact that they hadn't consummated their relationship in bed was something of a problem for Jennifer.
Having developed this gripping testimony, the Post delivered it front and center , of course.
Of course indeed.

A little context, however, might be in order.
In case anyone wasn't paying attention, the Post is the paper in which only two days earlier, columnist Andrea Peyser informed us that John Mason "may not be the most brilliant buttercup in the bouquet" and found it noteworthy that John appears to still possess the majority of his teeth. Before you go scouring her treatise, no, she does not bring up dueling banjoes, at least not yet.

A little east of the Hudson Yankee bigotry perhaps?
If one really wants to bounce off the high board into the deepest end of the gutter and discuss what precious little anyone knows about John and Jennifer's sex life, there are A FEW POINTS TO KEEP AN EYE ON:

1) Yes, they have apparently been chaste. John Mason has said in his rare public comments that, while they were literally living together, they weren't "living together" and were keeping their relationship "pure."
2) While tales full of sound and fury told by ostensible "friends" indicate both John and Jennifer had been more "active" in their respective pasts and may have sown a few wild oats, John enthusiastically reembraced his Baptist faith some five years ago and has since eschewed premarital sex, waiting instead to give himself entirely to that one, right, woman.
3) John and Jennifer had been involved for 18 months, a period well inside the five year window during which John presumably has been keeping his fly zipped, so Jennifer would've known pretty darn well what he was like from the first time they met.

AND...
4) After 18 months together, the entire "no sex" issue was four days from becoming moot on the evening Jennifer flew the coop.

So this entire escapade has been all about a couple's hangup over sex?

Really?
Or is it, just maybe, someone else who has the hangup?
Perhaps instead we're seeing a peculiar variety of blue-state befuddlement that these people who preach and advocate sexual restraint and self discipline might actually be exercising a little of it in their lives.