Why did so many early church fathers say that sex was a consequence of the Fall?

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I think the quotes given answer your own question as to why the fathers taught what they did. They seem to explain themselves rather clearly and their exegesis is pretty straightforward. The curse in the garden does seem quite loaded with reproductive consequences and those having to do with "desire".

However, the quotes given above are also polemical in that they reflect one side of the issue. A complete study of the matter would also necessitate us digging up all of the quotes from the fathers about the virtues of marriage and sexuality. In his book One Flesh Fr. Lawrence Farley gives some brief counterpoints from the fathers themselves.

In chapter 4 he references St. John Chrysostom's work On Virginity and notes that it was a writing composed to a monk to convince him that virginity was the higher calling and better than marriage. Of this the scripture leaves no doubt. However, St. John also recognizes marriage as an alternate path to salvation:

Far from disdaining the married state of most of his congregation or reviling marriage as unworthy, Chrysostom exalted it, especially in one of his sermons on St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians. In this sermon he said: 'From the beginning God has been revealed as the fashioner of this union of man and woman, and He has spoken of the two as one.... There is never such intimacy between a man and a man as there is between man and wife, if they are united as they ought to be. For truly this love is more despotic than any despotism; other desires may be strong, but this one alone never fades. For this love [Gr. eros] is deeply planted within our nature, which imperceptibly to ourselves attracts the bodies of men and women to each other. Do you see the close bond and connection, and how God did not allow anything from the outside to come between them? ... Nothing so welds our lives together as the love of man and woman.'

Later in this same sermon ... 'If you marry in this way and with these aims you will be not much inferior to the monks; the married person will be not much less than the unmarried.'

That was from Homily 20 of St. John Chrysostom on Ephesians.

From my own study I think it is fair to say that the universal Christian tradition in early times was to fully embrace the sexuality of marriage without contraception (all the fathers discourage any form of contraception), but to hold monasticism as the higher path. It does not offend me in my own married state to think this way, because it seems to be self evident in the experience of sexuality itself that it is messy, but in the end can lead us to love and God if not abused. Overall I think all those perspectives of the fathers above are fairly evident in the scriptures and can be seen in our own experience easily.

I appreciate the perspective of Fr. Josiah Trenham on this issue: http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/aftoday/sexuality_virginity_and_marriage. This is a 2 hour talk on just this topic. Fr. Josiah himself is married and has 12 kids and wrote a book about St. John Chrysostom's teachings on sexuality and marriage, which I suppose to be harmonious with the rest of the early fathers.

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Some of their other teachings suggest that marriage was created after the fall. Why, then, did they teach these things?

To understand the evolution from the early sex-affirming Hebraic culture to Christianity's persistent discomfort with sex and pleasure, we have to look at three interwoven threads: the dualistic cosmology of Plato [i.e. the soul and mind are at war with the body], the Stoic philosophy of early Greco-Roman culture [i.e., nothing should be done for the sake of pleasure], and the Persian Gnostic tradition [i.e., that demons created the world, sex and your body—in which your soul is trapped, and the key to salvation is to free the spirit from the bondage of the body by denying the flesh]. Within three centuries after Jesus, these influences combined to seduce Christian thinkers into a rampant rejection of human sexuality and sexual pleasure. - Robert T. Francoeur (The Religious Suppression of Eros)

It appears that these views on sexuality were heavily influenced by culture, specifically by the prevailing schools of philosophical thought.

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