1883's Comstockery Rises Again
By Jean Godden
Anthony Comstock, the blue-nosed anti-vice crusader, died in 1915, but the law he pushed Congress to pass back in 1883 remains on the books. The Comstock Act targets obscene literature, abortion, contraception, masturbation, gambling, prostitution, patent medicine, and forbids mailing anything “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or vile.”
Long believed unenforceable, the 150-year-old law is now resurfacing in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade. When U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ordered a hold on mifepristone, medication used in half of abortions nationally, appeals sent that case to the Fifth Circuit Court and then onto the U.S. Supreme Court. The case was argued in March, with Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas showing interest in the Comstock Act. Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation like to bring Comstock up because one of its clauses prohibited sending though the mail “every article, instrument, substance, drug and medication that can possibly lead to an abortion.”
So who was this Anthony Comstock? He was born in 1844 to a strict religious family in New Canaan, Conn., and enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War, where he was appalled by the behavior and profanity by his fellow soldiers. After the war he moved to New York where he worked as a porter in a stock club and joined the YMCA. He became obsessed by what he considered obscene material and began collecting examples.
In his role as secretary of the New York Society for Suppression of Vice, he took his “chamber of horrors” to the Capitol and got Congress to pass the act he himself had drafted. The impressed lawmakers appointed Comstock a special agent of the U.S. Postal Service with authority to carry a gun and arrest alleged violators. Soon after, state legislatures passed versions of Comstock laws.
https://www.postalley.org/2024/04/22/1883s-comstockery-rises-again/
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