The Heart of the Contraception Issue

Feelings.

For better or worse, government gives handouts to everybody and his brother. We complain about this all the time.

What is special about the contraception issue? Why are we drawing the battle lines here to fight that which is really small potatoes when it comes to government spending?

The answer lies in how it makes us feel. What happens inside your chest, inside your belly, when you hear that a young college-age woman is having lots and lots of sex and wants you to help her pay for birth control?

Compare that to what you feel when you hear that the government is spending nearly 100 billion dollars to corn and other farmers for no particular reason. Or more to the point, if somebody told you that amount was going to be increased by the same amount it would cost to pay for birth control in the current issue.

You may feel indignation there too, but is it of the same flavor? Why are so many people desperately digging trenches and putting up the barbed wire and making war cries, for this issue and not that one?

I will answer the question. We are not satisfied by our own sex lives, and it bothers us to hear about others who are. But we cannot admit, sometimes not even to ourselves, that we are bothered by this, because that very fact is a mark of shame.

Compare "I don't want to help you pay for contraception because my sex life is a total train wreck and I deeply envy everyone around me who seems to have a happy sex life, so go find somebody else to buy you pills", with a well-articulated and hard-hitting conservative or libertarian argument against a government handout.

Which one betrays less of our own shame? Which one positions us above the "masses" rather than below them, enabling us to replace our envy, which we so desperately wish we could disown, with contempt?

Is it time for us to finally admit that sex is a big deal? That our lack of it strongly influences our feelings which strongly influence which battles we pick in life?

People who are getting sex regularly and are happy with their sex lives don't make a big deal about sex and have an appropriately proportionate response to this issue regardless of which side of it or which side of the economic aisle they fall on. Doesn't it piss you off when somebody who is having great sex all the time tells you sex is really no big deal? Doesn't it kind of make you feel like a starving person being told by somebody who is well-fed that food really isn't the be-all and end-all of life?

You may see me as your opponent, but I'm trying to empathize. I think I have made the status of my own sex life sufficiently clear without directly stating it.

But we'll never change anything for the better if we aren't even willing to see our own deepest motivations. I don't know how to solve this issue. But denying our feelings on it is not going to help.

Does your religion forbid you from having these feelings? But do you have them anyway?

Do you think Jesus dislikes emotional honesty, the same Jesus who identified Truth as God?

Heck, let's talk about Jesus for a minute. He disliked hypocrisy a lot more than he disliked sex. In fact, he really didn't have much to say about sex at all. About the only thing he said was "You're all doing it in your heads so get off your high horses."

It's humbling. The bitterest pill is administered to the one who is already suffering the most.

But truth is, if swallowed, always a helpful pill, never a harmful one.

That was one of the funniest threads I've read in awhile!

Bravo for the humorous look at what is simply a ridiculous issue, intended solely to distract the masses from the fact that our economy is about to take another dramatic plunge.

Star and Flag for having the courage to start a thread on this touchy subject, and I agree with your assessment, mostly. What I question, is this idea of contraception as a government handout.

Unless you're on Medicare, tax dollars aren't involved in this discussion. It's about employer provided health insurance, requiring the insurance policy to cover contraception, with no co-pay. That doesn't mean the employee doesn't contribute to the cost of their health care.

If a woman has coverage, say through Humana, she has a regular doctor and gets annual pelvic exams and pap smears and her physician renews or adjusts her birth control. If her doctor is not allowed to prescribe BC, then she must go elsewhere to get the script. No doctor, in their right mind, will issue a script without performing a pelvic exam and pap smear, so she has to pay twice, just to get the script.

Except that contraception is not an unexpected expense but a regular one. Which means that if insurance covering it is benefitting you financially, it is hurting somebody else financially. This is simple math.

That of course is not the point of this thread nor the primary intention of this reply, which is to bump the thread, because come on people it deserves to be read.

Well, in regards to the "Contraception Issue"...

1) Birth control is a GOOD thing.

2) Religion is a BAD thing.

3) Sex is a very pleasurable human experience.

4) "Jesus" is fictional.

5) The church is a bunch of asinine HYPOCRITES.

6) Republicans are a bunch of DEVILS who try to win the religious vote because cult victims of religion usually question NOTHING, and just accept LIES, in addition to having a lesser intelligence level which republicans use in their favor to ensure votes from these folks who are totally UNAWARE that they are voting AGAINST there OWN BEST interests. (Unless of-course, said voters are of the SUPER-wealthy, otherwise they care SQUAT about you and your beliefs)

7) People from the Right will FUSS about ANYTHING that Obama does whether it is a good thing or not.

We are not satisfied by our own sex lives, and it bothers us to hear about others who are

That is one reason, also one of the main reason for being against abortion, but the reason that republican politicians are against it is that they need lots of poor, dumb people to vote for them, so they need teens and poor people having kids they can't educate.