The Hideous Resurrection of the Comstock Act

NYT OPINION: The Hideous Resurrection of the Comstock Act
By Michelle Goldberg
Section: Opinion
Source: New York Times
Published Date: April 8, 2023 at 03:00AM

How the right is using a 150-year-old law to try to ban abortion pills.

Anthony Comstock, the mutton-chopped anti-vice crusader for whom the Comstock Act is named, is back from the dead.

Comstock died in 1915, and the Comstock Act, the notorious anti-obscenity law used to indict the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, ban books by D.H. Lawrence and arrest people by the thousands, turned 150 last month. Had this anniversary fallen five or 10 years ago, it barely would have been worth noting, except perhaps to marvel at how far we’d come from an era when a fanatical censor like Comstock wielded national political power. “The Comstock Act represented, in its day, the pinnacle of Victorian prudery, the high-water mark of a strict and rigid formal code,” wrote the law professors Joanna Grossman and Lawrence Friedman. Until very recently, it seemed a relic.

Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/08/opinion/comstock-laws-abortion-texas.html