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If your sex life is none of my business, stop demanding that I finance it
Oral contraceptive pill, Contraception Injections and Women's Health Concept. (areeya_ann/Getty Images)

If your sex life is none of my business, stop demanding that I finance it

A lot of people have been offering their, um, feedback, to a couple of things I tweeted over the past week or so. And when I say "feedback" I mean that an angry mob numbering in the thousands descended upon my social media feeds and email inbox like rabid hyenas, eager to inform me that I'm awful, evil, ugly, fat, old, stupid, [expletive], [expletive], [expletive] [expletive] [expletive], etc., and because of this I should die, my wife should die, my children should die, everyone who has ever said a kind word to me should burn to death in a house fire, and my kids, who should already be dead, should also somehow become gay and transgender and pregnant so that karmic justice may be visited upon me, a bigot and a Nazi who is literally worse than a millions Hitlers combined.

Of the thousands of responses I received since Friday, easily 95 percent of them consisted of some combination of these. Because of my unspeakable tweets, I have been objectively described as an "anti-LGBTQ bigot" in the headlines of news articles. So far as I know, nobody who has written an article matter-of-factly calling me a bigot took the time to reach out to me first, but I suppose if I'd followed the clearly outlined instructions of the leftist Tolerance Brigade, I should have killed myself by now anyway. I guess they assumed I wouldn't be able to comment because I'd be too busy playing Backgammon with my friend Adolf in Hell.

I say all of this not to paint myself as a victim but to again drive home the point that the people who preach the loudest about "acceptance" and "tolerance" are often the least likely to demonstrate those qualities when the opportunity presents itself. I think this is an important point not because it exposes them as hypocrites -- although it does that, for certain -- but because it exposes "acceptance" and "tolerance" as faux virtues.

Nobody on Earth accepts and tolerates everything, nor should they. Things should only be accepted and tolerated if they are acceptable and tolerable. Liberals deny that any standard of acceptability and tolerability can be imposed, yet they have no problem ruthlessly imposing such standards themselves. So it isn't that conservatives are less tolerant than liberals, it's that we have different ideas about what is tolerable. Liberals clearly believe that my ideas and my very existence are intolerable, proving that they do not actually consider tolerance a universal principle. They're right. It's not.

With that established, I'd like to elaborate on the two horrible things I said on Twitter which caused such an absurd backlash.

First, provoking the ire of our nation's feminists, I said this:

"If you actually cannot afford birth control then you are not nearly mature or responsible enough to be having sex in the first place."

Second, unrelated and actually from a week before, in reference to the man who was just named spokesmodel for Maybelline but intended as a general comment about men who reject their masculine nature in order to appropriate femininity, I said this:

"Dads, this is why you need to be there to raise your sons."

I already elaborated on that second point. I'll have more to say about it later, but I'm going to start with the birth control topic. I should stipulate upfront and for the record that I issue no apology for either statement, neither am I interested in "explaining myself." Myself is irrelevant. I'm not the topic here. I don't really care if you think I'm a horrible person, but I do care about the issues at hand. If I'm given an opportunity to go further into depth about them, I will gladly take it.

So, birth control then. A few points:

1. If you aren't prepared to deal with the natural consequences of sex, you should not be having sex.

I do wish I'd worded my birth control tweet differently, but not for the reason everyone thinks. My fear is that if you isolate that statement and don't consider it within the larger context of the conversation about the supposed "right" to birth control (more on that in a moment), you might think I'm suggesting that birth control is a prerequisite to sexual activity. It may seem that I'm saying it's inherently responsible to use birth control and only those who use it should have sex. The people who've been blowing up my inbox for the past 72 hours certainly did not interpret it that way -- they were angry for quite a different reason -- but I could see how someone might.

In truth, I believe that the responsible thing is to have sex only when you are open to the life it may create and in a position where that potential life will be afforded the stability and security it deserves. It is not easy to save sex for its proper context, which is marriage, and I'm not saying that everyone who fails in this regard is an evil scumbag, but it is nonetheless the right and proper way. The prerequisite for sex ought to be marriage. That's not a statement of personal moral superiority -- again, I'm not the topic, I don't matter -- but simply a statement of a moral and social reality.

One of the problems with birth control is that it separates and isolates the pleasure of the sexual act from its life giving potential. That has led to two giant misconceptions: 1) That it's somehow a "mistake" when the natural consequences of the sexual act are fully realized. 2) That we all have the right to experience sex free from those natural consequences.

No such mistake exists. No such right exists. Sex, like anything else, has a nature and a purpose. We can attempt to manipulate its nature and suppress its purpose, but we cannot fundamentally change its nature and purpose. When we have sex, whether we are using contraception or not, we are doing something that by its very nature may create human life. Therefore, it stands to reason, we should only engage in it when we are prepared to fully embrace that nature. A person who acts shocked and appalled by the natural consequence of sex is like a person with a peanut allergy who acts shocked and appalled when he breaks into hives after consuming a PB&J. What did you think was going to happen? If you can't handle peanut butter, don't eat peanut butter. If you can't handle a kid, don't have sex. This is rather simple, I think. Not easy, no, but simple.

I realize the above analogy is flawed because nobody is actually allergic to kids (although all parents have moments when they strongly suspect otherwise). Maybe the better analogy would be to someone who eats peanut butter despite strongly disliking peanut butter, and then reacts with surprise and offense at the objectionable flavor he deliberately subjected his taste buds to. Or maybe there really isn't any appropriate analogy to be drawn between sex and peanut butter. Well, you get my point anyway.

2. Stop whining about how "unaffordable" birth control is.

Now we get to the crux of my Hitler-esque tweet. We hear this constant moaning about how birth control is so very difficult to obtain and afford, and, the argument goes, this is why the government should provide it. I find it somewhat awkward to discuss this aspect of the birth control debate because I'm not actually interested in giving anyone advice on how to get birth control. As I've stated, I think you should just get married and have some kids and stop worrying about it. I have three of 'em myself. They're not so bad, I promise.

But because this "unaffordable" myth is used to push government funding of contraception, I do think it needs to be addressed on its own merits. And that's where I say you are clearly not mature enough or competent enough to have sex in the first place if you are the sort of person who wants contraception but cannot figure out how or where to get it. Condoms can be found everywhere and they're dirt cheap. Generic birth control pills can run you 20 bucks a month or less. Then there are free birth control methods such as abstinence or Natural Family Planning. Can't afford it? Sorry, I don't buy it. And by "it" I mean your argument and your birth control.

Yes, there are more expensive methods. Maybe your insurance will cover those. Maybe it won't. Either way, that's not my concern as a taxpayer. Besides, saying "you can't afford birth control" because you can't afford the most expensive variety is like saying you can't afford a TV because you can't afford a 60 inch smart LED. You may not be able to afford the exact TV you want, but you can probably afford a lesser model. And if you really can't afford any at all, you'll live. People survive without TVs. People survive without birth control.

Yes, there are people who use the Pill for reasons separate from preventing birth. I’m not talking about those cases. We are discussing birth control. If you are on some program of hormonal treatment for, say, endometriosis, then you are taking medication for a physical disorder. If you're taking birth control exclusively for a reason that does not include contraception, then you are not really taking birth control. You may be taking a substance that can also be used as birth control, but for you it is actual medicine for a legitimate medical issue. So when I speak of birth control I speak only of the cases where it’s used primarily or exclusively to prevent the birth of a child (which is about 86 percent of cases, according to a hard left advocacy group). If you are using such a method but not for such a purpose, then I would submit that you are not using birth control at all. Just as it wouldn’t be fair to compare you to a heroin junkie just because your doctor prescribed you OxyContin. Although, even here, I don't think the government should pay for it. A lot of women have told me that they take birth control to regulate their periods. Well, frankly, that's not my responsibility to finance either. But it's a separate discussion.

Those cases aside, birth control -- that is, contraception intended to contravene in the sexual act -- is not necessarily expensive nor is it difficult to come by. I could find contraception at Walgreens for less than the cost of a Mountain Dew if I wanted to. I don't want to, but I could. It strikes me that so many young, college educated women act as though they are utterly powerless to control whether a human is conceived in their womb unless the government subsidizes their contraception. If they are in fact so confused and incompetent, sex should be the last thing on their agenda. Perhaps they should learn to be functional adults before they hop in bed with anyone. Maybe consult a life coach or a financial planner? I don't know. Please just talk to someone.

3. If your sex life is none of my business, stop asking me to finance it.

You'll notice that the modern liberal spends all day shoving her sex life in your face, demanding that you accept it, celebrate it, fund it, but then when you refuse on any of those fronts, she immediately shrieks that you should "mind your business" and "stay out of her bedroom," etc. Well, we would love nothing more than to mind our business, but you have made that impossible by defining "minding one's business" as "the act of financing the sexual exploits of complete strangers."

Liberals insist that contraception be provided to them dozens of different ways -- through federal mandates, at schools, at free clinics, so on and so on -- and if they fail to take advantage of these entitlements, abortion clinics must be maintained with tax money as an Option B. They want us to subsidize the drugs that make it possible for them to have frivolous sex, and subsidize the institutions that violently destroy the children that may still be conceived as a consequence of that frivolous sex. They want us intimately involved, it seems, every step of the way. The only thing they haven't asked us to do is foot the bill for the lingerie and the motel room.

That was a crude and gross joke, they'll tell me. Well this is a crude and gross situation. It's crude and gross that they make their personal contraceptive methods into a matter of public concern even as they say it's nobody's concern but their own. Liberals are right now in a state of panic that the contraception mandate and Planned Parenthood funding may go away at once. If they weren't shameless hypocrites, they'd be rejoicing. Freedom, finally! They want us out of the way, out of their bedrooms, their sex lives, their bodies, yet they're sent into an apocalyptic panic at the thought that they just may get their wish. Might that indicate that it was never really their wish at all?

I would love nothing more than for their sex lives to truly be none of my business. But as long as you're using my money, it will be my business how it's spent. Don't like it? Then get your hand out of my wallet and take charge of your own affairs. You'll be better off, trust me. We all will.

To see more from Matt Walsh, visit his channel on TheBlaze.

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