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.

  • @FiniteBanjo
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    123 months ago

    Simultaneously anti-sex and pro-child-pregnancy, of all the stupid shit.

    • @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Pregnancy as a punishment rather than a goal. The specter of a nine-month-long nightmare existence, where you’re bloated and nauseous and in constant physical and emotional pain, only to produce a still birth thanks to your lack of health care. That is just about as anti-sex as you can get.

    • @Leviathan@lemmy.world
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      63 months ago

      That’s because the price of admission is Christianity and marriage. If you don’t have those things you don’t get to be in the bodily-autonomy cool-kids club.

      • @captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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        53 months ago

        They don’t get bodily autonomy even then. Try asking them if they think it’s really rape when a husband has sex with his wife when she says no.

        • @Leviathan@lemmy.world
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          13 months ago

          I’m sorry, you’re totally right on that one. I suppose men get admission, women get to hold their jackets outside the fence and watch them ride the rides.

    • @melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      They’re only anti consensual sex. Rape is fine and godly and perfectly alright.

      Unless the victim has, like, a serious rape fetish. Then it becomes extra evil. Defiling a pure virtuous rape with pleasure. shudder