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.

  • snekerpimp@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    God didn’t say “go forth and make yourself plenty”, he said “be ashamed of your genitalia and the urges I have placed deep in your psyche to reproduce, and instead tie reproduction to a legally binding document that enslaves a gender of the species”

    • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      The reason they are against birth control is at least partially because the Bible says to go and reproduce a lot. The whole point of contraception is to stop that from happening.

      • dirthawker0@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        And it ties in with the great replacement thing. They don’t want to be outnumbered by those non-white non Christian second class citizens.

          • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            The republicans are a high control coalition party. Some of them don’t mind if black Christians reproduce like crazy so long as they follow the right style of Christianity. Others are happy to have black people to hide behind until they have the power to enact their racism. The thing that unites them is that they all want similar enough of a situation and believe that when they have the power their faction comes out on top. The atheist white nationalist isn’t looking at the black quiverfull as their fellow republican or vice versa, they’re both looking at the moderately racist but keeps it quiet Christian nationalist and betting that those people will side with them. And in the meantime they share immediate goals in preventing women from sleeping around or participating fully in society