The conservative obsession with purity and control is being achieved by increasingly punitive means
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.
Fascist movements use conservative "moral" judgement and their disgust at minority sexualities as a tool to control their ideological enemies.
It's why they hate birth control and abortion so much: they allow women to control their own lives and have a career. The Nazis also had a program to drive women out of the workforce so that men didn't have to compete with them.
As if that weren’t enough, in May 2023, the Heritage Foundation declared on social media, “Conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills.”
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”
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.
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.
Diddling little girls, specifically. They think humanity was at it's peak during the Bronze Age, when women weren't considered people, they were a resource like livestock.
If you're trying to tell people about that, what it is that they're doubling down on and all that, you can't presume the audience knows everything about the topic already, or frame what should be shocking as normal.
"Republicans are a fascistic anti sex doomsday cult" should be an extremely alarming phrase. That so many people can just say "well, yeah, and water is wet" to that is also alarming.
the history of sex-obsessed conservative movements tells me that they're more likely to make vasectomies mandatory for a certain brand of person. Or, more accurately, for anyone who isn't a certain brand of person.
Yeah, though let’s be honest about their hang ups, they may not feel vasectomies keep them safe enough. They already attempt to metaphorically emasculate many of their enemies
From the makers of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, coming soon to a community near you - the War on Fucking. Bring back the America of dry handjobs and the crippling fear that an unwanted pregnancy will ruin your lives.
Everyone can start doing that weird bed bouncing thing the Mormon kids are doing. That's clearly a loophole that is acceptable by even the most strict nuts
It'll never stop being hilarious to me that people that claim to believe in an all-knowing, all-seeing god think they can loophole their way around the rules and god wouldn't care.
The Fundamentalist Christian hijacking of the Republican party started over 50 years ago, but it wasn't until Alzheimer's-ridden Ronald Reagan got into office that it was given the green light by a President.
Nixon was the first symptom everyone could see, Reagan was the metastasizing, but the original infection goes all the way back through George Lincoln Rockwell, the John Birch Society, and the business plot
No it goes all the way back to the Puritans coming over because the Catholics weren't repressing and persecuting enough for them ("they weren't hurting the people they needed to be).
Time to break out my favorite Barry Goldwater quotes:
Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.
And:
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!
Or:
Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism. Fellow Republicans, it is the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, private or public, which enforce such conformity and inflict such despotism. It is the cause of Republicanism to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people.
Last one for now:
I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism."
This Republican Senator was telling it like it was all the way back in the 60's.
My favorite thing about Goldwater is he was terrifying for his time. The Goldwater rule is because of how fucking nuts he was. In short he ran on a platform of blatant racism. Had the Republican Party followed his path we’d likely be fighting today against a party of white nationalism with a Christian nationalist wing instead of the inverse we fight today.
That's a mechanism, but not really an explanation. We could have (and historically have had) a very horny religion rather than one that hates anyone caught getting off.
I'd put the real blame on Patriarchy. Old dudes hate it when young dudes fuck. Incels hate it when anyone else gets laid. Sons are jealous of how much pipe their moms are getting. Straight men are convinced that gay men want their assholes (and secretly jealous of the gay orgy happening next door). Locals are terrified of big dick foreigners running off with their moms, wives, and daughters. And when these are the people that get to make the rules about fucking, its Mutually Assured Destruction for us all.
If you want a sexually progressive society, you need to be like the Bonobo. Put the horniest middle-aged women in charge and let male sexuality be a competition rather than a threat. Then all the grumpy, violent chimps get replaced with fabulous preening peacocks and everyone gets amazingly good at sucking clit.
Became? Because they were like that when I was growing up. Their insistence on their right to knowingly give factually incorrect information in sex ed was an early radicalizing moment for me as a teenager in the late 00s
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.
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.
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.
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.
While the backlash to Roe’s June 2022 overturning has been spectacular, with Democratic election victories and blue-state legislation strengthening reproductive rights, that doesn’t spare women in red states from the horrific consequences of the decision.
The far right the Heritage Foundation belongs to is, nevertheless, driving toward this goal by striving to take away birth control and abortion to make sex punitively risky for anyone who might get pregnant.
The right has also made noise about ending no-fault divorce and marriage equality, and introduced hundreds of anti-trans bills this year and last.
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The best way to prevent misuse of the Comstock Act is to hit them where it hurts. Find out what items their funders sell or trade in the most; then find logical ways to link it to sex or abortion.
Pretty soon you'll gum up all trade and they will cry for mercy.
Meh, the only thing that SCOTUS is going to do with mifepristone is tell the lower courts to knock it the fuck off. It's going to remain federally legal and widely available.