Bitchy History - Bitchy History： The Comstock Act

00:00:00.000 something that's you know kind of bitchy pretty bitchy bitchy i know it's just you know bitchy

00:00:07.680 well first of all you're a little bitchy that's that's next level bitchy welcome to bitchy history

00:00:14.460 the irreverent history podcast where one history professor gets to bitch about history and the

00:00:18.780 impact it has on the world today hey guys welcome back to bitchy history i know it's been a minute

00:00:25.860 since the last episode came out. I apologize. Last semester was pretty wild, but the semester is over

00:00:31.460 now. I have submitted all the final grades, and that means I can be back to actually making content

00:00:36.660 again. And I have a really fun episode for you guys today. So let's get started. So you know,

00:00:41.940 when I was in grad school, I read a lot of things that I figured were going to be still relevant to

00:00:47.220 the real world. You know, Sinclair Lewis's, It Can't Happen Here, Hannah Arendt's The Origins

00:00:53.620 of totalitarianism, like these are still relevant. But the one thing that I did study and write about

00:00:58.800 in grad school that I really didn't see coming, making a comeback in the 21st century has to be

00:01:03.920 the Comstock Act. Now there's a lot of people who are having to frantically familiarize themselves

00:01:09.040 with the Comstock Act recently, which is a weird thing to have to do, having to familiarize yourself

00:01:14.180 on the fly with a random law from the beginnings of the Gilded Age. But I unfortunately already

00:01:20.940 knew quite a bit about the law as a result of this paper that I had written for a class called

00:01:26.080 History of Diversity back in 2020. Shout out to the professor of that class, Dr. Shield, who was

00:01:32.180 a fantastic second reader on my thesis and also managed to put up with the fact that I had to

00:01:37.260 make every paper that I wrote at a European university somehow about American history and

00:01:43.060 culture. I apologize, but he was from New York, so you know, he was as much of an ugly American as I

00:01:49.600 was, guys. No, he was not. He was great. Unfortunately, the Comstock Law is making a

00:01:54.920 comeback in the current political discourse, so I thought it might be a good idea for me to give

00:02:00.360 you guys a little rundown on the history of the law, the history of Anthony Comstock,

00:02:04.700 and just its general impact on the legacy of America and the chilling effect that it could

00:02:10.060 have going forward as well. Unfortunately, the Comstock Act does affect more things than just

00:02:15.920 access to birth control or access to information about reproductive health care, those would be

00:02:21.520 bad enough. But Anthony Comstock took it a lot further. And unfortunately, the law is still in

00:02:28.340 the books, right? So Anthony Comstock, he was the original buzzkill. He was born in 1844 in New

00:02:35.540 Canaan, Connecticut. The first and last good thing he did with his life was fighting for the Union

00:02:40.740 during the Civil War. I'm sure he made plenty of friends when he was a soldier because he took a

00:02:45.800 very strong stance against cursing and pornography in the military. I'm kidding. I'm being sarcastic.

00:02:54.440 No one liked him. I mean, look, I don't have a source from history that specifically says the

00:02:59.460 words, no one liked Anthony Comstock, but it's pretty obvious. Also, he gets stabbed in the face

00:03:04.560 once by a pornographer in New Jersey. So yeah, it's a lot. There's a lot going on. So after the

00:03:10.320 war, he moves to New York City and he takes up a series of jobs, one of them being the clerk at a

00:03:14.840 dry goods store. But eventually he is going to become associated with the Young Men's Christian

00:03:19.740 Association.

00:03:37.960 There's a joke in that somewhere, but I'm not going to be the one to stoop low enough

00:03:41.920 to make it. So you're going to have to imagine that one for yourselves. In 1873, there are going

00:03:46.660 to be two things that are going to happen in Comstock's life, which are going to be pretty

00:03:49.860 major for him and for the rest of the country. The first is that he's going to get the YMCA

00:03:55.740 to help him start the organization, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice,

00:04:00.620 which is basically the New York City Fund Police. And we're also going to see him begin to work as

00:04:05.580 a special agent for the U.S. Postal Service in order to help enforce the Comstock Act that he

00:04:10.340 is going to get through Congress. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice mostly focused

00:04:15.660 on banning literary works that they found obscene or preventing them from being published in the

00:04:20.220 United States. The only half-decent thing they ever accomplished was getting a James Joyce novel

00:04:24.980 banned from the United States, but even then it was not for the very reasonable reason that Ulysses

00:04:30.580 is criminally boring. No, it was because they found it criminally obscene because at one point

00:04:36.620 in the novel, Masturbation is mentioned. So that's fun. Of course, a book being boring should not be

00:04:44.560 a good reason to ban it. It is banned from my bookshelves for that reason, but other people

00:04:48.860 should be able to purchase it without fear of Comstock swooping in and arresting them, which

00:04:54.220 he did on a regular basis. Comstock was surprisingly influential. Like I said, he managed to get an

00:05:00.200 entire law through the United States Congress in 1873, which was titled in full the Act for the

00:05:07.440 Suppression of Trade in and Circulation of Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use. You can

00:05:12.380 see why we kind of call it the Comstock Act instead. The name's a mouthful. So very broadly,

00:05:18.160 this law criminalized any use of the U.S. Postal Service to send any of the following items through

00:05:23.440 the mail. Obscenity, contraceptives, abortifacients, sex toys, personal letters with any sexual

00:05:29.740 content, and any information regarding above said items. You know what would have really just given

00:05:36.440 Comstock an aneurysm? Sexting. I wish I could bring him back from the dead just to explain that

00:05:42.940 concept to him. It would be hilarious. It really would. So the current relevance of this law has

00:05:48.940 become very clear since the Dobbs decision in June of 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade.

00:05:54.620 Unfortunately, the Comstock Act is still in the books, and now we have people who are wanting to

00:05:59.140 bring it back and use it again. It has been edited slightly since its original inception in 1873.

00:06:06.020 In 1971, Congress did update the language to remove the restrictions on mailing contraception

00:06:11.940 and information about contraception from the law. This was around the same time that we had two

00:06:16.600 major Supreme Court cases, Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird, which had both made that

00:06:22.180 language null and void. However, after Roe v. Wade, there were four separate attempts to remove

00:06:29.780 the language about abortion from the act, but none of those ever made it out of committee or to a

00:06:35.080 floor vote, and so that language is left in the bill, and it's still there that can be used and

00:06:42.100 enforced, right? This is a huge loophole for 21st century heirs to the Comstock moral crusade to use

00:06:49.760 to create sort of a backdoor ban on abortion, even in states where it is completely legal.

00:06:58.460 They're going after Mifepristone using that. That's the case that was on April 7th, 2023.

00:07:03.600 Matthew Kazemar, who was a district court judge in Texas, ruled in the case Alliance for Hippocratic

00:07:08.740 Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration that the Comstock Act made mailing abortifacients

00:07:14.200 illegal. An appeal on this case hit the Supreme Court just in March of this year, but given that

00:07:19.900 this is the same court that repealed Roe v. Wade, I don't have high hopes for this to go

00:07:26.820 in the right direction. So if an 1873 law is going to be making a comeback in being enforced in the

00:07:33.740 United States, it might be a good idea to know what the Comstock Act does and how it impacted

00:07:38.540 American society at the time. In one report from January of 1874, it was said that in the very

00:07:44.400 first year of its existence, the Society for the Suppression of Vice had seized 134,000 pounds of

00:07:50.560 obscene books, 194,000 lewd pictures and photographs, 14,200 pounds of stereotype plates,

00:07:57.860 so printing plates, 60,300 articles made of rubber for immoral purposes. I wonder what those might

00:08:05.820 have been. They're probably condoms, but I'm sure there was some other stuff in there too.

00:08:09.700 And 5,500 sets of playing cards. They also didn't like gambling very much because, you know,

00:08:14.960 why be fun? And 31,150 boxes of pills and powders, mostly labeled as aphrodisiacs. Now,

00:08:22.660 you know what? Those might've been like the 1870s equivalent of date rape drugs, in which case,

00:08:27.760 good, get those off the streets. But I have a problem with the rest of the stuff on that list.

00:08:31.640 let people have their playing cards and condoms and whatever articles of rubber made for immoral

00:08:37.360 purposes that they want to own. Leave them alone. So it's not just information on birth control and

00:08:42.280 abortifacients that the law was going after. The Society for Suppression of Vice had a problem with

00:08:48.100 a lot of things, right? Comstock had some very broad ideas of what materials should be banned

00:08:53.520 under the 1873 version of the law. For instance, if you were a medical student in the 1870s,

00:08:58.760 you might have had a really difficult time getting your hands on an anatomy textbook and getting it

00:09:03.160 delivered to you through the mail because you went after those. Huh. Moralizers making it harder for

00:09:08.680 doctors to train in their field. I wonder why that sounds familiar. Right. It's probably because most

00:09:15.640 people who are training to be doctors in pro-life states are also facing restrictions in their

00:09:20.360 ability to be fully trained in those states because of abortion bans. Who would have guessed

00:09:26.040 But a bunch of people who think that the COVID-19 vaccine is going to turn us into 5G transmitters

00:09:31.160 might also be anti-science and anti-medicine. I mean, look, I don't know if all pro-lifers are

00:09:37.160 also anti-vax. I can't prove that. But it does feel like the Venn diagram of those two groups

00:09:42.680 is basically a circle. That's all I'm saying, right? The law as it stands today in the legal

00:09:48.520 code spends about 95% of its language discussing the banning of every article or thing designed,

00:09:55.320 adapted, or intended for producing abortion. But it also contains this very vague sentence as well,

00:10:00.720 which has sweeping implications. Every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy, or vile article,

00:10:07.140 matter, thing, device, or substance is a non-mailable matter. So playboy, you can't get

00:10:13.060 that delivered to your house anymore. But not only can you not get it delivered to your house,

00:10:16.880 the stores and corner markets that sell it can't get it delivered to them either,

00:10:20.800 because that also goes through the mail and this was really a major part of what Comstock wanted

00:10:26.500 to address his start as a moral crusader was in getting booksellers arrested for selling

00:10:32.060 pornography that was his whole thing his very first arrest involved him buying illicit materials

00:10:37.100 from a bookseller then taking his evidence to police and having the police come back and arrest

00:10:42.140 the guy he then ups his game he takes a reporter with him to a place called St. Ann Street which

00:10:47.020 is a location in New York City where you can apparently buy just all sorts of smut. And he

00:10:52.060 succeeds in getting several more dealers who are selling obscene books arrested at that point.

00:10:57.860 But it's not until Comstock gets the backing of someone named Morris Jessup, who was a New York

00:11:02.620 banker and philanthropist, and he's also one of the co-founders of the New York City YMCA, go figure,

00:11:09.120 that's when Comstock's crusade against indecent literature really starts to pick up. Because

00:11:14.040 Jessup had money and he had influence and that is what's going to make it possible for a 29 year

00:11:19.000 old with a really weird obsession with how other people get off to be able to become a major

00:11:24.360 influence in sweeping federal regulations and laws which would make anyone with even the most

00:11:29.260 casual respect for the first amendment just absolutely weep. So after the Comstock Act is

00:11:35.540 passed we have a man named John Cresswell who is President Grant's Postmaster General and he is

00:11:40.600 persuaded to give Comstock a job, and that job is as a special agent in charge of enforcing the

00:11:46.680 Anti-Obscenity Act. Now, there were actually a lot of special agents working for the U.S. Postal

00:11:51.740 Service at this point, but all of them had very specific jobs. They were basically doing all the

00:11:56.980 mundane shit behind the scenes to make sure that the postal system was running smoothly and

00:12:01.980 efficiently, but Comstock, he didn't have to do any of that. He didn't have to do any of the mundane

00:12:06.780 shit. His entire job is just to make sure that the postal system is not being used to send obscene

00:12:13.080 content. And he did shut down some fraud and scam rings and the Louisiana lottery, which might be a

00:12:20.220 good thing, right? But at what cost, right? Within a year of the Comstock Act being enacted, he had

00:12:27.040 made 55 arrests under the new laws. Thanks to the efforts of Comstock and his followers, states

00:12:32.180 around the country enacted their own versions of the Comstock Act, one of which would be the focus

00:12:36.820 of the Griswold v. Connecticut case in 1965. In only four years, Comstock had more or less shut

00:12:43.480 down the vice trade in America, or pushed it further underground at the very least, and they

00:12:48.580 weren't having as many high-profile arrests anymore. But he had to continue to justify his

00:12:53.640 budget, so he scouted far and wide for more people to harass about their obscene content. 1877 is

00:13:00.720 about when he would begin to go after publishers of anatomical medical texts and European art

00:13:05.360 books, which had nude figures in them. Shame, shame. Can't be doing that, even if it is art.

00:13:11.040 As he said in his 1886 book, Morals vs. Art, pure morals are of first importance. They are

00:13:17.480 protected by law, while art, if unclean, is not. That's an interesting interpretation of the First

00:13:24.820 Amendment there, Anthony. Very interesting. People who think America has always been a bastion of

00:13:30.280 free speech and self-expression are, they're very delusional. They're kidding themselves.

00:13:36.580 I don't want to spend this entire episode on just Comstock's exploits because there is a legacy

00:13:41.420 of his that continues to impact American freedom even after he dies. But I do want to share one

00:13:47.100 particularly hilarious line from Comstock's reaction to an attempt to overturn the Comstock

00:13:52.280 Act. In 1878, a writer named Ezra Haywood was arrested by Comstock over another terminally

00:13:58.780 boring pamphlet titled Cupid's Yokes or the Binding Forces of Conjugal Life, an essay to

00:14:04.840 consider some moral and physiological phases of love and marriage wherein is asserted the natural

00:14:10.060 right and necessity of sexual self-government. That name is too long. What the hell were you

00:14:15.400 doing, Haywood? In any case, Haywood was part of the late 1800s free love movement, which I have

00:14:22.040 no doubt I will discuss in a future episode. After all, it was the free love movement that gave us

00:14:26.840 our first female presidential candidate, who coincidentally was also arrested by Comstock

00:14:32.200 at one point in her life.

00:14:34.500 Haywood was convicted and sentenced to two years of hard labor at Norfolk County Jail.

00:14:39.180 Theodore Wakeman, a prominent Boston attorney, said this in response to the conviction.

00:14:44.160 Two plainer violations of the Bill of Rights, two meaner outrages upon liberty, decency,

00:14:49.520 and morality have never been perpetrated among our people.

00:14:53.120 The learned judge did not invent them.

00:14:54.920 They are old instruments of the Christian Inquisition.

00:14:58.540 Haywood supporters took the issue all the way to Washington, D.C.

00:15:01.240 They appealed to President Rutherford Hayes to pardon Haywood.

00:15:04.940 Hayes took one look at Cupid's yokes and found the idea that it was obscene or lascivious to be absolutely absurd,

00:15:11.820 and he had Haywood pardoned.

00:15:13.640 He was released after serving only six months of his two-year sentence.

00:15:18.080 70,000 signatures were gathered asking for the Comstock Act to be overturned,

00:15:22.800 and there was a packed hearing that occurred in front of the House of Representatives.

00:15:27.140 Describing this hearing, Comstock wrote,

00:15:29.040 As I entered the committee room, I found it crowded with long-haired men and short-haired women,

00:15:34.480 there to defend obscene publications, abortion implements, and other incentives to crime by repealing the law.

00:15:40.720 It's been over 150 years, and conservative talking points and bitching haven't changed even a little bit, apparently.

00:15:48.220 I mean, have you seen a lot of the how miserable and how miserable looking a lot of the students are?

00:15:53.560 They're deliberately like uglifying themselves.

00:15:56.020 You see them on TikTok.

00:15:57.960 They're out of shape.

00:15:59.300 They're asexual.

00:16:00.700 They're like they don't want they're like rejecting.

00:16:03.300 They're rejecting the truth and beauty.

00:16:06.180 They all look like rejects from a loony bin.

00:16:08.980 Like, why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions?

00:16:16.220 Obviously, this hearing was unsuccessful. Comstock would spend another three decades opening other

00:16:22.920 people's mail and probably viewing more pornographic content than any other single man in existence at

00:16:28.840 the time. Sometimes I feel like maybe all of this was just a scam to let Comstock build his own

00:16:33.680 porn library for free. But again, I don't have any proof of that. I just like to make scurrilous

00:16:39.040 speculations about people's morality when they're this interested in other people's morality.

00:16:45.240 Margaret Sanger, who would be one of the final obsessions of Comstock in his later years, had this to say about the whole thing.

00:16:51.800 When the Constitution of the United States authorized Congress to establish post offices and post roads, it was not intended that the authority should go beyond this.

00:16:59.880 It did not authorize it to censor the matter to be conveyed, nor to sit in judgment upon the moral or intellectual qualities of the printed matter or parcel entrusted to it to deliver.

00:17:09.940 The post office was primarily a mechanical institution, not an ethical one.

00:17:14.240 whose business was efficiency, not religion or morality.

00:17:19.420 Comstock died in 1915.

00:17:21.960 He's buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Brooklyn.

00:17:25.080 Sumac section, lot 95.

00:17:27.860 What you do with that information is up to you.

00:17:30.340 I take no responsibility for any charges your behavior in that cemetery might or might not result in.

00:17:37.180 In unrelated information, public urination is in fact a crime in New York.

00:17:42.580 So, uh, just good information to have.

00:17:49.500 Despite his death, Anthony Comstock's legacy has lingered on.

00:17:53.620 Have you ever wondered why we have that bury your gays trope?

00:17:57.200 You know, the weird thing where it seems like all gay characters always end up dead or miserable in film or television?

00:18:03.680 You can thank Comstock for that, too.

00:18:06.080 Let me quote to you from the foreword to the 2004 edition of the famous lesbian pulp novel Spring Fire,

00:18:11.660 which is actually the reason I know so much about the Comstock Act. That was the book I was writing

00:18:17.460 a paper on. Marianne Meeker had pitched an idea for the book to her boss, the new editor at Gold

00:18:23.380 Metal Books. She wanted to write a story about her own first love, a girlhood romance she had

00:18:28.460 experienced with a fellow female student at her boarding school that had its own real-life

00:18:33.160 bittersweet ending, though not anywhere near as tragic as the one that her novel would eventually

00:18:38.380 be published with. Carol, her boss, surprised her when he told her that he thought the book could

00:18:43.180 be published, but immediately told her she would have to change the story. You might have a good

00:18:47.900 story there, Carol said, but you'd have to do two things. The girls would have to be in college,

00:18:52.700 not boarding school, and you cannot make homosexuality attractive. No happy ending.

00:18:58.120 Well, my story didn't have a happy ending anyway, Meeker said, but your main character can't decide

00:19:03.400 she's not strong enough to live that life. She has to reject it knowing that it's wrong. You see,

00:19:09.040 our books go through the mail. They have to pass inspection. If one book is considered censurable,

00:19:14.300 then a whole shipment is sent back to the publisher. If your book appears to proselytize

00:19:18.840 for homosexuality, all the books sent with it to the distributors are returned. You have to

00:19:23.480 understand that. I don't care about anybody's sexual preference, but I do care about making

00:19:28.160 this new line successful. In other words, Meeker said, my heroine has to decide she's really not

00:19:34.020 queer. That's it, and the one she's involved with is sick or crazy. So that's nice and fun.

00:19:40.900 The paper I wrote in grad school on this topic found that the exact same tropes that were being

00:19:46.640 used to evade the Comstock Act of censorship in the 1950s and 1960s with these pulp novels

00:19:52.340 are the same tropes that are used over and over again in American television and film.

00:19:58.140 Apparently, the idea that murder or suicide or institutionalization or the fact that one character finds out that they're not really gay and happily becomes a married woman to a man is just really popular still here in America.

00:20:14.380 The Comstock Act, however, doesn't actually have anything to do with television, so you might ask, why?

00:20:20.440 Why does the Comstock Act have anything to do with these tropes?

00:20:23.180 Well, the problem is that Comstockery tends to leave a lasting cultural impact across the board.

00:20:29.520 Those books are published with those storylines in them over and over and over again,

00:20:34.440 and so when people consume that media, they think, well, that's the way that you tell this story.

00:20:39.260 The story always ends sadly, and that translates over into how they write for television and film as well.

00:20:46.360 We're seeing the same Anthony Comstock turns of phrases today as well,

00:20:50.040 coming out of the mouths of my favorite domestic terrorist organization, Moms for Liberty.

00:20:55.360 And while the Comstock law isn't being actively used to censor the kind of things that Comstock

00:20:59.840 and Moms for Liberty would find obscene today, it's still on the books. And if they can bring

00:21:04.760 it back to restrict access to abortion pills, which is definitely what the conservatives want,

00:21:09.960 hell, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 literally has a section which states,

00:21:15.540 campaigned to enforce the criminal prohibitions in 18 U.S.C. 1461 and 1462, the Comstock Act,

00:21:24.020 against provider and distributors of abortion pills that use the mail. And who's to say that

00:21:29.260 it ends with the mail? Who's to say it ends with restricting abortion pills? That would be bad

00:21:34.480 enough, but it can go further. And you might say, but Professor Meredith, this only has the potential

00:21:39.980 to censor things sent through the mail, and we live in the 21st century. We have the internet.

00:21:45.540 Okay, yeah, sure, but do you really think that internet service providers can't be forced to

00:21:51.420 censor what they show based on federal or state laws? Congress literally just passed a law allowing

00:21:57.540 them to ban access to an app used by millions of Americans if that app won't do what the government

00:22:04.440 tells them to do. How do you think that will be policed? No one's gonna roll up to your house in

00:22:09.920 a cop car and force you to delete TikTok from your phone. They're just going to regulate ISPs

00:22:15.640 and app stores and prevent them from getting updates on American phones until the apps become

00:22:20.960 so unstable that they crash. They'll ban content through back doors, much like many states have

00:22:27.120 been doing with their own versions of Comstock laws in the 21st century. States like Utah, Texas,

00:22:33.080 Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, and North Carolina have all passed

00:22:38.760 bills that de facto banned Pornhub in their states. Bills like Texas House Bill 1181 which

00:22:45.760 required age verification for access to online pornography. On the surface that sounds fine.

00:22:51.400 I don't want minors accessing pornography online but the penalty for failing to age verify was so

00:22:58.680 ridiculously over the top on the lines of things like $10,000 per day if a child is exposed to

00:23:05.660 pornographic content due to not properly verifying a user's age, that Pornhub simply decided to block

00:23:11.860 their website in those states rather than risk falling afoul of those fines. It's not a violation

00:23:17.840 of the First Amendment, the court said, because the states themselves didn't ban Pornhub. Pornhub

00:23:23.400 did that themselves. Just like the government didn't outright tell gold medal books that they

00:23:29.780 couldn't publish novels where lesbians rode off happily into the sunset at the end of the story.

00:23:34.640 The publisher simply took the proactive approach to make sure that their business couldn't get in trouble in the first place.

00:23:42.060 In Utah, HB 29 banned books, including pornographic or indecent material from school libraries,

00:23:48.580 and further allowed school districts to ban books throughout the state.

00:23:52.320 If three schools, districts, or five charter schools ban a book,

00:23:55.980 the book will be automatically banned throughout all the school districts in the state.

00:24:00.440 The inclusion of charter schools creates a major loophole in this law, which could serve to get an

00:24:05.480 awful lot of books banned statewide. American Preparatory Academy has seven campuses in Utah,

00:24:11.720 and Carolyn Charette is one of the founders and the executive director of the school.

00:24:16.360 And she explains the school's ethos in this way. I'm hoping to indoctrinate using truth and data

00:24:23.640 that Marxism and socialism and communism are bad and that free market is good.

00:24:28.600 We are unequivocal about that. Here's a tip, Carolyn. If you have to use the word indoctrinate

00:24:35.400 in the sentence, then truth and data are probably not actually a part of your curriculum. Just

00:24:41.640 letting you know that right off the bat. And this reminds me that I need to do an episode

00:24:46.680 on the absolutely vile history of school choice initiatives in the United States. There's school

00:24:52.360 choice. And then there's school choice. And unfortunately, a lot of it is the worst second

00:24:58.820 one. We'll talk about that in another episode. But back to my point. Some of the books that have

00:25:03.920 been pulled from shelves by schools in Utah already include things like The Kite Runner,

00:25:09.340 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and The Freedom Writer's Diary. Also, the 2007 National Book

00:25:16.380 Award for Young People's Literature book, which was an absolutely true diary of a part-time

00:25:22.260 Indian. Yeah, yeah, definitely all of those sound like they're right up there along with penthouse

00:25:28.480 as far as levels of pornographic content. I'm certain that these were all intelligent choices

00:25:33.980 to ban. If you aren't watching the video version of the podcast, just know that I am, I am rolling

00:25:39.360 my eyes a lot. In 2022, the Center for Renewing America, which is a massive red flag of a name

00:25:47.020 just off the start, wrote an article titled, Combating Obscenity on the Internet, a Legal

00:25:53.280 and Legislative Path Forward, in which they laid out a specific plan for how to combat

00:25:58.280 obscenity. And honestly, most of the tools they are using are identical to ones that

00:26:02.960 we're already seeing being used successfully in the pro-life camp. Like the case against

00:26:08.140 Mifepristone in Texas, which was filed in a district that was notoriously conservative,

00:26:12.540 The CRA recommends stacking the deck legally by only bringing federal prosecutions against

00:26:18.180 obscenity in trial venues that are conservative enough to get the results that they want.

00:26:22.800 Here's a quote from the article.

00:26:24.520 Federal prosecutors could reinvigorate this strategy and be more aggressive in bringing

00:26:28.680 obscenity cases against online websites in conservative areas of the country, like Utah,

00:26:33.940 for example, even if the obscenity is largely distributed in, say, Nevada and New York.

00:26:38.920 But more explicitly, they push for federal and state legislation, including what they call a Comstock Act designed for the Internet, which would override Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which at present protects Internet service providers from liability for carrying unlawful content.

00:26:56.040 Just like Anthony Comstock, states like Texas and Utah and organizations like Heritage Foundation

00:27:01.680 and Center for Renewing America love to use the argument that they're just trying to protect the

00:27:06.680 children, but it has nothing to do with protecting children. Just like being pro-life has nothing to

00:27:11.280 do with protecting babies. It's about control, plain and simple. It always has been. So let's

00:27:16.600 put these zombie laws back in the ground where they belong and keep them there. I don't need

00:27:20.640 Comstock coming back from the grave, shambling around, trying to get a look at my internet

00:27:24.420 history, or the books, pills, or articles made of rubber for immoral purposes that I may or may not

00:27:30.640 have shipped to my house. Thank you for tuning in to hear me bitch about history. If you're loving

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00:28:00.440 What a bitch, right?

Bitchy History - May 06, 2024

Bitchy History： The Comstock Act

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