The conservative obsession with purity and control is being achieved by increasingly punitive means

The US supreme court justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas cited the Comstock Act, named after the 19th-century anti-vice campaigner Anthony Comstock, in last week’s case about access to the abortion pill mifepristone. If you don’t know who Anthony Comstock was or what his law did, that might not have alarmed you. But it should have.

The Comstock Law has come up a lot lately, and it’s part of the Republican war on sex, and to put it that way might sound overly dramatic. But there is such a war, and parts of it – against sex education, against access to birth control, against the healthcare provider Planned Parenthood and of course against abortion – have long been out in the open along with a war against the rights of women and on the rights and very existence of queer and trans people.

Comstock was reputed to be driven by religious shame over masturbation to become his era’s most extreme anti-sex crusader. He rose to prominence in the early 1870s, when he convinced Congress to make it a crime to advertise, sell or mail contraceptives or give out contraceptive information, even orally, or to mail anything “immoral” – a term whose vagueness allowed widespread prosecution, including of a feminist newspaper reporting on sexual abuse whose prominent publishers, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, he got sent to prison. Like modern-day rightwingers he was a book-burner, and he boasted that he had driven 15 people to suicide.

  • Asafum@feddit.nl
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    3 months ago

    But but but muh small guberment! Muh keep your guberment outta muh business!

    These stupid sheep will vote R and bah bah bah along with whatever their “thought leaders” tell them to do…

    I’m getting very frustrated that the party of hate is making me hate so much too… I hate them with every fiber of my being…

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      But but but muh small guberment! Muh keep your guberment outta muh business!

      Its easy to forget that “Small Government Conservatism” neatly tracked the GOP as an outsider party. Democrats controlled the House of Representatives continuously from 1932 to 1994. They also controlled a majority of governor’s mansions and state legislatures for roughly as long. As soon as Gingrich took Congress in '94 and then Bush took the White House in '00, the Republican love of small government fell away like old skin off a snake.