Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Anthony Comstock, the anti-abortion movement's new hero, explained
A 19th-century anti-sex crusader is the “pro-life” movement’s new best friendAnthony Comstock, the 19th-century scourge of art and sex, is suddenly relevant again thanks to Donald Trump’s worst judge.
https://www.vox.com/politics/23678636/supreme-court-anthony-comstock-abortion-mifepristone-matthew-kacsmaryk
By Ian Millhiser Apr 12, 2023
snip
An obscure shopkeeper became one of the most powerful censors in American history
Anthony Comstock saw the devil in everything.
In his 1883 book Traps for the Young, Comstock wrote that newspapers, magazines, novels, and even fine art were snares used by Satan “to capture our youth and secure the ruin of immortal souls.” To fight the devil, Comstock claimed, Christians must eradicate the very words that encourage lust and licentiousness. There is “no more active agent employed by Satan,” Comstock wrote, than “EVIL READING.” Yet, as a young man just a few years out of a Civil War stint in the Union Army, Comstock seemed unlikely to someday turn his censorious vision into a reality. Working at a dry goods shop in postwar Manhattan, Comstock complained often to local authorities about nearby saloons and publishers of sexually explicit materials, and was frequently ignored. “Crime stalketh abroad by daylight,” he complained in his diary, “and Public officers wink at it.”
The turning point in Comstock’s life came after he wrote a letter to an official at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), complaining that he had pushed for criminal prosecutions against the smut peddlers he perceived around him but could not secure convictions. At the time, the YMCA was known less for the network of affordable suburban gyms where many modern-day children play, and more for its efforts at vice suppression. Leaders of the Y in New York City successfully lobbied for state legislation banning obscene art and literature, and they needed an investigator to sniff out violations of this law and bring the violators to justice. Anthony Comstock was the man for this job.
It was this alliance with many of New York’s wealthiest and most prudish men that powered Comstock’s career as an anti-vice crusader. Working first under the auspices of the YMCA, and then later under the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock led a multi-state effort to find sexual materials, destroy them, and arrest anyone responsible for distributing them. As art historian Amy Werbel writes in Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock, in seven years of work for the YMCA, Comstock played a key role in “seizing and destroying 134,000 pounds of books, 194,000 ‘bad pictures and photographs,’ [...] and 60,300 ‘articles made of rubber for immoral purposes, and used by both sexes.’” His work also led to 106 arrests across the states of New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut.
Comstock’s most consequential accomplishment, however, was the federal legislation formally titled “A bill for the suppression of trade in, and circulation of, obscene literature and articles of immoral use” — the law now widely known as the Comstock Act. The law that bears Comstock’s name was not drafted by Comstock himself. But it was Anthony Comstock who successfully lobbied Congress to pass the bill by setting up an exhibition of sexualized art and other material he acquired as the YMCA’s anti-vice detective in Vice President Schuyler Colfax’s room in the United States Capitol. Two months later, the New York legislature incorporated the NYSSV, which would employ Comstock for the remainder of his life. The new organization’s official logo left little doubt about its purpose. It is bifurcated, with an image of a man being led off by a police officer on the one side, as another man burns a pile of books on the other.
snip
14 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/20/sex-and-the-constitution/
https://archive.is/wip/56nZT
My new book, “Sex and the Constitution,” will officially be released on March 21. I have worked on this book, off-and-on, for roughly a decade. My goal was to explore the history of sex, religion, law and constitutional law from the ancient world to the 21st century. I’m pleased to report that the early reviews have been quite glowing, including from such folks as Laurence Tribe, Linda Greenhouse, Cass Sunstein, Erwin Chemerinsky, David Cole and George Chauncey. I am especially pleased that my friend Eugene Volokh has invited me to write a series of five pieces about the book for the Volokh Conspiracy. Each of these pieces will consist of edited excerpts from the book. This, the first of those pieces, is drawn primarily from the prologue and the epilogue in order to give readers an overall sense of the work. The four subsequent pieces, which will appear each day this week, will focus on representative moments in the vast sweep of history explored in “Sex and the Constitution.” I hope you will find them interesting and illuminating.
We are in the midst of a constitutional revolution. It is a revolution that tests the most fundamental values of the American people and that has shaken constitutional law to its roots. It has bitterly divided citizens, politicians and judges. It is a battle that has dominated politics, inflamed religious passions, and challenged Americans to rethink and reexamine their positions on issues they once thought settled. In the course of this struggle, American law has called into question the constitutionality of a broad range of government regulations of sexually-related behavior, including contraception, abortion, obscenity, sodomy and marriage. As a consequence, the Supreme Court has found itself confronting fundamental questions about the nature of sexual freedom, the meaning of liberty, equality and privacy, the legitimacy of government efforts to dictate sexual morality and the appropriate role of religion in public life. “Sex and the Constitution” explores the remarkable process through which Americans, and especially the justices of our Supreme Court, have navigated these profoundly divisive and important questions.
Not surprisingly, our social mores and our laws governing sexual behavior are deeply bound up with religious beliefs and traditions. A central theme of “Sex and the Constitution” is that American attitudes about sex have been shaped over the centuries by religious beliefs — more particularly, by early Christian beliefs — about sex, sin and shame. A nettlesome question in constitutional law is how courts should cope with that history in a nation committed to the separation of church and state. It is a bit of a puzzle that constitutional law has come to play such a central role in shaping our debates over these questions. Nothing in our Constitution expressly guarantees a right to sexual freedom. Supreme Court justices from almost any prior era in American history would be stunned to learn of the role the Supreme Court and our Constitution have come to play in our contemporary disputes — some call them “culture wars” — over such issues as obscenity, contraception, abortion, sodomy and same-sex marriage. The constitutional revolution we are now witnessing is the consequence of a long, complex and fascinating history. It is a history shaped over the centuries by such diverse and antagonistic voices as Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Anthony Comstock, Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, Harry Blackmun, Jesse Helms, Phyllis Schlafly and Anthony Kennedy, to name just a few.
Over the grand sweep of history, social, religious and legal attitudes toward sex have shifted dramatically. These shifts have not been in any one direction. Rather, they have swung back and forth, depending on a range of influences and circumstances. Whereas the Greeks and the Romans did not attach any religious significance to sex, the early Christians came to view sex as inherently sinful. For more than a millennium, the church imposed its beliefs about sex on the faithful, but left those who did not share the faith to their own destinies. This began to change in the late Middle Ages, as first the church and then Protestant reformers turned increasingly to the secular law to require all people to confirm their behavior to the dictates of the dominant religion. As time passed, enlightenment thinkers came to reject many of the dogmas of traditional Christianity and, more broadly, the assumption that the dominant religion can legitimately conscript the power of the state to impose its own notions of sin on others. This view shaped the understandings of the framers of our Constitution and led ultimately to the principle of separation of church and state.
snip
https://archive.is/wip/56nZT
My new book, “Sex and the Constitution,” will officially be released on March 21. I have worked on this book, off-and-on, for roughly a decade. My goal was to explore the history of sex, religion, law and constitutional law from the ancient world to the 21st century. I’m pleased to report that the early reviews have been quite glowing, including from such folks as Laurence Tribe, Linda Greenhouse, Cass Sunstein, Erwin Chemerinsky, David Cole and George Chauncey. I am especially pleased that my friend Eugene Volokh has invited me to write a series of five pieces about the book for the Volokh Conspiracy. Each of these pieces will consist of edited excerpts from the book. This, the first of those pieces, is drawn primarily from the prologue and the epilogue in order to give readers an overall sense of the work. The four subsequent pieces, which will appear each day this week, will focus on representative moments in the vast sweep of history explored in “Sex and the Constitution.” I hope you will find them interesting and illuminating.
We are in the midst of a constitutional revolution. It is a revolution that tests the most fundamental values of the American people and that has shaken constitutional law to its roots. It has bitterly divided citizens, politicians and judges. It is a battle that has dominated politics, inflamed religious passions, and challenged Americans to rethink and reexamine their positions on issues they once thought settled. In the course of this struggle, American law has called into question the constitutionality of a broad range of government regulations of sexually-related behavior, including contraception, abortion, obscenity, sodomy and marriage. As a consequence, the Supreme Court has found itself confronting fundamental questions about the nature of sexual freedom, the meaning of liberty, equality and privacy, the legitimacy of government efforts to dictate sexual morality and the appropriate role of religion in public life. “Sex and the Constitution” explores the remarkable process through which Americans, and especially the justices of our Supreme Court, have navigated these profoundly divisive and important questions.
Not surprisingly, our social mores and our laws governing sexual behavior are deeply bound up with religious beliefs and traditions. A central theme of “Sex and the Constitution” is that American attitudes about sex have been shaped over the centuries by religious beliefs — more particularly, by early Christian beliefs — about sex, sin and shame. A nettlesome question in constitutional law is how courts should cope with that history in a nation committed to the separation of church and state. It is a bit of a puzzle that constitutional law has come to play such a central role in shaping our debates over these questions. Nothing in our Constitution expressly guarantees a right to sexual freedom. Supreme Court justices from almost any prior era in American history would be stunned to learn of the role the Supreme Court and our Constitution have come to play in our contemporary disputes — some call them “culture wars” — over such issues as obscenity, contraception, abortion, sodomy and same-sex marriage. The constitutional revolution we are now witnessing is the consequence of a long, complex and fascinating history. It is a history shaped over the centuries by such diverse and antagonistic voices as Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Anthony Comstock, Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, Harry Blackmun, Jesse Helms, Phyllis Schlafly and Anthony Kennedy, to name just a few.
Over the grand sweep of history, social, religious and legal attitudes toward sex have shifted dramatically. These shifts have not been in any one direction. Rather, they have swung back and forth, depending on a range of influences and circumstances. Whereas the Greeks and the Romans did not attach any religious significance to sex, the early Christians came to view sex as inherently sinful. For more than a millennium, the church imposed its beliefs about sex on the faithful, but left those who did not share the faith to their own destinies. This began to change in the late Middle Ages, as first the church and then Protestant reformers turned increasingly to the secular law to require all people to confirm their behavior to the dictates of the dominant religion. As time passed, enlightenment thinkers came to reject many of the dogmas of traditional Christianity and, more broadly, the assumption that the dominant religion can legitimately conscript the power of the state to impose its own notions of sin on others. This view shaped the understandings of the framers of our Constitution and led ultimately to the principle of separation of church and state.
snip
Nevermind. Too damn early. 
