Originally posted by: Kurgan
It's completely inaccurate. The term has NOTHING TO DO WITH SEX, and everything to do with ORIGINAL SIN.

I don't mean to nitpick, but you're kind of nitpicking Zombie here, particularly in light of the fact that he's already changed his text, so I'll go for it:

The term immaculate, while not containing the word sex in its definition, actually has nothing to its meaning which absolutely forbids its application to sex if people really want it to. I personally think it's stupid to use the term "immaculate conception" to describe a virgin birth, since it muddles the origin and meaning of that technical phrase within Roman Catholic thought, but it's not exactly as if the terms "immaculate" and "conception" cannot possibly be combined to have a different meaning involving a "sexless" impregnation, since sex can be a messy, spot-producing thing I suppose. In fact, that is probably how the Roman Catholic phrase was originally misunderstood; it's too vague.