Anthony Comstock: American SJW - DetroitOtaku Rants

Prologue

“Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternatives.”

- Barry Goldwater

Oh, it’s about that time now.

I know some of you have been waiting a long time for this. Don’t worry, I remembered. I’ve just been waiting for the right time to strike. 

I’ve been meaning to write this article for at least the last two years, in fact. But I’ve been very lazy in actually getting this article done unfortunately. Not to mention the large amount of research I’ve had to do on this subject. 

Taking inspiration from Razorfist’s video on Abraham Lincoln, I thought I would do something similar for another “sacred cow”, but rather a sacred cow of the Religious Right and online Gen Z Twitter Tradcons. You’ll notice that in this article my tone might sound something like that of Razorfist in his Lincoln video, which goes to show you how much I was inspired by that to write this article…and how much I like listening to Razorfist.

I consumed no small number of sources in preparing to write this article. From articles and books that take a neutral tone on this subject, to feminist agitprop calling the man in question Satan Reincarnate, as well as outright worshipful stuff about the man as well. Worshipful, you say? Of a man who has federal laws on the books named after him? Surely, you jest!

Considering all of the constant bullshit that fans of Japanese pop culture have had to put up with from radical feminists and boomer “traditional conservatives” over the past 30 years, especially with all the creeping woke censorship we’re seeing in the video game industry as of late, I feel that an article such as this is necessary. In fact, this topic goes beyond the constant attacks being waged against Japanese pop culture by both the left and right. Movies, literature, and even comic books were even attacked as well. This article is intended to show you the root cause of all these crusades against not just popular culture, but also free speech in America. And while this man may not have been the first, he was most certainly the most influential of them all. So influential in fact that his influence over American attitudes towards popular culture and political discourse can be felt even to this day. While all the moral crusaders, SJWs and despots that followed him in the decades after his death may not cite him as inspiration for what they do (hell, some of them have probably never heard of him too.), the tactics they use are very similar to his.

This man almost single-handedly changed American culture in ways that still resonate with us to this day. I want to make one thing clear about this article:
 

This is NOT open to interpretation.

This is NOT an “agree to disagree” situation.

It’s time for it to be said:

Anthony Comstock was America’s first true Social Justice Warrior. He was the original anti-fun, anti-pop culture, anti-beauty, anti-First Amendment authoritarian. He possesses all of the traits of the modern woke SJW movement that is ruining American political discourse and both American and Japanese pop culture. And his behavior has manifested itself in the modern woke left and feminist movements as his arguments for censorship and his tactics are being recycled by them. He is having quite the comeback despite being dead for over a century.

Sure, as mentioned before, there were people like Comstock well before he began his crusade. In the book Rereading Sex by Helen L. Horowitz, she notes that Americans have worried about the content of the books their neighbors were reading ever since colonial times, and can even be traced back to the time of the Puritans. Back during the 18th Century, the supervision of morality was mainly left up to religious ministers (1).

One could argue that the Anthony Comstock of colonial times was famous English jurist William Blackstone, whose work had great influence in the early United States. Blackstone did not deal with obscenity as such or call it a crime or misdemeanor, though he did make distinctions between a private vice and a public wrong (1).

William Blackstone himself was something of a moral purist. However, Blackstone is absolutely tame compared to Comstock. Once Comstock came out onto the scene, everything changed. Which is why in this article, I’m going to show you the details about the man himself, his influences and inspirations, and his legacy - that he was the one who created the tactics of the radical feminists and SJWs of today. Those are the types of people I’m calling out in this article. 

I intend to present a right-wing critique of Anthony Comstock.

Ah, but I can hear you already:

“cRiTiCiZiNG cOmStOcK?! wHaT aRe yOu, a lOlBeRtArIaN?!”

Sit down and enjoy the ride. Time for Chapter One.

Chapter One: The Origins of The Great Censor

“Any given censor is a fool. The very fact that he is a censor indicates that.” - Heywood Broun

To understand why Anthony Comstock was such a massive tyrannical prude who would lose his cool even when a female showed even a bit of skin, we have to look at his background.

Anthony Comstock was born in New Canaan, Connecticut on March 7, 1844 to Thomas Anthony Comstock and Polly Comstock (nee Lockwood). Comstock’s mother Polly was a direct descendent of the original Puritans, the settlers who arrived on the shores of New England not long after the Pilgrims. To understand Comstock’s background, we must look at the Puritans’ religious background.

The Puritans were Calvinist Christians. Calvinists are Christians who follow the teachings of reformer John Calvin. Calvin taught that God was all-powerful and sovereign, and that all human beings were born sinners. Calvin also taught that God had chosen a select few people for salvation known as “the elect”, and that the rest of humanity was sentenced to damnation for all eternity.  Calvinism is summarized by the acronym TULIP: 

• T stands for Total Depravity
• U stands for Unconditional Election 
• L for Limited Atonement
• I for Irresistible Grace
• P for Perseverance of the Saints

“Total depravity stands for the state of all of humanity after Adam’s fall, hence we are unable to choose G-d on our own; unconditional election refers to G-d choosing the elect whom He will save; and limited atonement, as we might expect, means that only the elect can achieve atonement.”(7) 

The main byproduct of Calvinism is that of Legalism. What is Legalism? It refers to the direct or indirect attachment of behaviors, disciplines, and practices to belief in order to achieve salvation and right one’s standing before God. Legalism is the idea that policing all works will put you in God’s favor because you are fulfilling God's law. It emphasizes that one needs to perform certain deeds in order to gain salvation. Legalism refers to the belief that Christians should abstain from practices that supposedly run contrary to Christian witness, including but not limited to: gambling, consuming alcohol, dancing, listening to secular music, watching movies, watching TV, wearing immodest clothing, playing video games, and going to nightclubs (24). Hmm…

Hence, Legalism is often associated with fundamentalist Christians and Calvinist sects of Christianity. These Christians believe that they are living in obedience to God. The problem with Legalism, however, is that it is heresy, and Legalism itself was denounced by both Jesus and the Apostle Paul as being heretical (16). The Puritans embodied every word of Legalism. They regarded art and literature as competition to the Bible (13). Human creativity was viewed by the Puritans as suspicious and satanic, and worthy of cruel punishments. Not to mention that the Puritans’ treatment of women and the poor raised eyebrows even at that time (13):

Now, I don’t know about you guys, but that sounds an awful lot like Sharia Law…

Comstock was raised as a Congregationalist and later became a Presbyterian, both of which are Calvinist sects of Christianity. The one responsible for Comstock’s indoctrination at a young age was Reverend Theophilus Smith of the Congregational Church of New Canaan. Smith is basically Comstock’s political idol and the one who inspired him to carry out his crusade against obscene literature. As described by Amy Werbel in her book Lust on Trial, “Smith was particularly remembered for his ‘carefully formulated Confession of Faith’ and his Instruction in Righteousness, which provided for ‘the unquestioning correctness of doctrine which has kept the members of this church, and their scattered descendants, satisfied to let alone the shifting charms of speculation” (4).

During the 1830s, states in New England saw a vast expansion of subjects taught in their schools, with the exception of one state - Connecticut. New Canaan was no exception. The residents of New Canaan funded and controlled the town’s school district. In 1841, the residents of New Canaan chose an inspector to report on the progress of the town’s schools to state officials. The inspector they chose was none other than Theophilus Smith. As Werbel summarizes, “Under Smith’s tenure, no book in the school district’s list came anywhere close to the New Testament in terms of its ubiquity and centrality within the program of study. Smith had little doubt about the usefulness of the Bible for teaching almost any subject. With genealogy, history, and even ‘practical truths’ emanating from scripture, the common school curriculum Anthony Comstock experienced as a child was largely an extension of catechism”, and that “Nothing in the curriculum, pedagogy, or structure of New Canaan’s municipal, religious, or educational institutions caused Anthony Comstock to doubt the doctrines and dominion of the Congregational Church, nor to entertain any ‘charms of speculation.’” Werbel also continues to note that Comstock was a devout Calvinist by stating that when he was old enough to paraphrase Romans 5:5 in his diary, “the sermons, hymns, and commentaries he venerated all promised that a heaven ‘radiant with purest light’ was possible through deeds on earth. Salvation now was to be earned, rather than discerned” (4).

Keeping with Puritan tradition, sexual mores in Connecticut were heavily and strictly enforced as the state passed its first obscenity laws in 1834. Both men and women were only allowed to dress in clothing that covered much of the body. Women’s dresses revealed little skin, with high necks and long hems. Artists in Connecticut also avoided showing any bare skin out of concern for breaking the law - for example, the Kellogg Brothers avoided it in the painting Ladies Bathing (4).

Another figure that helped shape Comstock’s views was none other than feminist activist Catharine Beecher. Like Comstock, Beecher was raised a Congregationalist. In Beecher’s book Treatise on Domestic Economy, it expressed the Congregationalist view on sexual education, which amounted to a policy of “see no evil, hear no evil” (4): 

“Disclosing the details of vice, in order to awaken dread of its penalties, is a most dangerous experiment, and often leads to the very evils feared…The safest course, is, to cultivate habits of modesty and delicacy, and to teach, that all impure thoughts, words, and actions, are forbidden by God, and are often visited by the most dreadful punishment” (4).

As Werbel notes, Beecher’s recommendation of silence on the “mysteries” of the human body proved to be foundational for Comstock as he was preparing the Comstock Act. Beecher asserted that the only way to protect the youth was to hint at the “dreadful punishments” associated with sexuality in general terms and prevent access to works that might provoke “impure sexual thoughts” (4). Now, how similar does that dialogue sound to the feminist and SJW dialogue revolving around “the male gaze” and the push to make female characters ugly in video games? 

The Civil War is where we witness Comstock begin to transform into the great censor. We begin to see that Comstock was an authoritarian in waiting. During his time in the Union Army, Comstock was widely disliked by his fellow recruits for his hatred of erotic literature and alcohol, as he would pour his whiskey rations on the ground instead of letting them have it (2). Though what is most revealing is that we learn that Comstock gave in and actually consumed pornography when he was with the Army, which we learn from his diary entries which were presented by Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech in their 1927 Comstock documentary titled Roundsman of the Lord, a book that takes a look at Comstock's personal history, along with his investigative, surveillance, and law enforcement techniques. We learn from his diary entries that he was in fact, a chronic masturbator (6)(11):

“I debased myself, I deplore my sinful weak nature so much. If I could but live without sin, I should be the happiest soul living: but Sin, that foe is ever lurking, stealing happiness from me. What a day will it be when that roaring Lion shall be bound & his wanderings cease, then we will have rest, the glorious rest free from sin. O hasten ever welcome day, dawn on our souls”

Broun and Leech described Comstock’s diary as being “filled with confessions of guilt and outbursts of bitter remorse” (4). However, both Broun and Leech were the last ones to have ever viewed Comstock’s diary entries, which have now been lost for nearly a century. If only someone was able to save it, it would have given me a hell of a lot more material to work with in making this article. His addiction to masturbation more than likely filled him with guilt and likely had a lot to do with him deciding to launch one of the largest crackdowns on free speech in U.S. history (4)(6).

And so, Comstock sent out to accomplish what Beecher and his idol Theophilus Smith failed to do during their times…

Chapter Two: Comstockery Before Comstock

“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? 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.’” 

- Barry Goldwater, 1981

As I mentioned at the start of this article, one could argue that the Anthony Comstock of colonial times was famous English jurist William Blackstone, whose work had great influence in the early United States. Blackstone did not deal with obscenity as such or call it a crime or misdemeanor, though he did make distinctions between a private vice and a public wrong (1). 

Blackstone, however, wrote what may be the most serious obstacle to freedom of speech in America, a country which made free speech and expression a cornerstone of it’s Constitution (1):

“To punish…any dangerous or offensive writings which, when published, shall on a fair and impartial trial be adjudged of a pernicious tendency, is necessary for the preservation of peace and good order.”

England itself indeed had strict laws regarding obscenity. And some states did start adapting obscenity laws starting in the 1810s, though the only ones that did were Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York. The states back then relied on British common law to prosecute so-called obscenity, however the first obscenity prosecution to actually occur in the United States happened in 1815, well after this nation had gained its independence (1).

During the earliest days of the United States, there was a very broad market for erotic literature in all thirteen colonies and it was published in many genres. It became such a massive market that the government sought to clamp down on it during the middle and late 19th centuries (1).

The Tariff Act of 1842 (also known as the Black Tariff), which was reluctantly signed into law by President John Tyler at the behest of the Whig-controlled Congress, was the first to significantly crack down on the importation of erotic literature from Europe. It was a protectionist tariff which caused trade and imports to the U.S. to decline sharply as it raised the import tax on foreign goods to try and protect U.S. industry from European competition (1)(3). Also in the 1840s, states began to increase their use of English common law to prosecute obscenity, relying on the English case Rex v. Curl (1727), which made it a crime to inflict damage “against civil society or the public at large” (1). Later on, state legislatures would revise common law and write their own statutes. Though only four states wrote statues against obscenity before the start of the Civil War - the first state to introduce an obscenity statute was Vermont in 1821, followed by Connecticut (1834), Massachusetts (1835), and Pennsylvania (1860) (12)(11). And even after the war, only three more states passed statutes against obscenity - New York (1868), New Jersey (1869), and Michigan (1869) (9).

It was during this time that publishers decided to ditch retail sales and turn instead to the mail to lure in customers. However, that would eventually be clamped down on as well, as in 1865, around the end of the Civil War, Captain M. G. Tousley of the Union Army was so concerned about adult material circulating among troops that he sent a letter to President Lincoln complaining about it and included a sample catalog to prove to him how out of control things were getting. Thanks to printing technology becoming cheaper and more efficient, publishers were now able to produce inexpensive adult books and photographs that they could mail to paying customers. This also caught the attention of Lincoln’s postmaster general, Montgomery Blair, who called for federal legislation to bar adult materials from the mail. And so, Lincoln signed a law which barred “obscene books, pamphlets, pictures, print, or other publications of a vulgar or indecent character” from the mail (6). Just in case you needed another reason to hate Lincoln. 

Speaking of which, as Razorfist mentioned in his video on Lincoln (see above link), America’s homegrown political binary is the small government states’ rights of Thomas Jefferson and the Democrats versus the centralized government statism of Alexander Hamilton and later the Whigs. The Democrats were the more moderate party on social issues, while the Whigs were seen as the socially conservative party. 

For example, let’s take a look at the case of preacher Abner Kneeland. At the 1834 Thomas Paine celebration in Boston, Kneeland became the only man in U.S. history to serve a sentence for blasphemy. He said that he hoped, in a toast to both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, that “the invidious Laws of Massachusetts against Blasphemy and Witchcraft - May they soon be abolished.” Kneeland was a Universalist, but later converted to pantheism. He published letters where he disavowed any God other than nature and the divinity of Christ. He was arrested and taken to court after writing statements about the subject in the December 20, 1833 issue of the Boston Investigator (1).

Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw - a Whig, upheld his conviction after drawing on what Blackstone wrote about blasphemous and obscene libel, along with a book written by British juror Thomas Starkie titled, A Treatise on the Law of Slander and Libel. Starkie believed that the real danger to freedom of speech and expression came not from the courts but rather from individuals “who endanger the liberties of all, by abusing the most valuable of their own, for unworthy base, and venal purposes.” However, Kneeland claimed that he never denied the existence of God. He was a pantheist, not an atheist. Kneeland claimed that the Massachusetts law violated the guarantee of freedom of the press (1).

Shaw’s decision greatly restricted freedom of speech and freedom of expression, rights that appeared to be protected in state constitutions and the federal one under the First Amendment. The only member of the five-man appellate court who opposed Kneeland’s conviction was future Massachusetts governor Marcus Morton. Morton was a Jacksonian Democrat who denounced it as unconstitutional, and stated that every person had the constitutional right to discuss God and to confirm or deny his existence. He ultimately concluded that “I cannot agree that a man may be punished for wilfully doing what he has a legal right to do.” Kneeland tried to overturn his conviction three more times - his second and third trials ended in a hung jury, and his conviction was finally upheld in 1838. In the trials he faced, all the judges who found him guilty were Whigs, and those who found him innocent were Democrats (1). 

One of the central issues that led to Kneeland’s conviction being upheld in 1838 was the medical pamphlet Fruits of Philosophy by physician Charles Knowlton. Knowlton was a Freethinker, and he was one of the earliest advocates of contraception in the United States. He believed that sex and sexuality must move out of the realm of morality and into physiology, as noted by Horowitz. After Fruits of Philosophy was published in Boston in 1832, Knowlton was sentenced to hard labor in prison for three months for obscenity. In the eyes of Massachusetts lawmakers and courts, simply writing about birth control was considered obscene according to Horowitz. Kneeland took notice of this and wrote about Knowlton’s conviction in the Boston Investigator, claiming that it was a revival of the Salem Witch Trials (1).

Knowlton responded to Kneeland, stating that “Yes, in this theoretically free country, I am imprisoned for publishing what I honestly and firmly believe to be the most useful idea that ever entered the brain of a philosopher.” Knowlton believed that a double standard had been applied to him, as copies of Aristotle’s Masterpiece - a guide to reproduction and sexual matters - was sold openly, and that he thought he was prosecuted because his method of contraception required anatomical description to make it understood. Knowlton made clear that he made sure “not to offend the prejudices even of the most inconsiderate and prudish” (1).

The second edition of Fruits was published in 1833 by Kneeland, which cleared up a lot of errors and misunderstandings from the original edition. Knowlton was then arrested and tried for the third and final time in Greenfield, Massachusetts. This time, Knowlton made a pamphlet in his own defense asking if his publication was obscene. He believed, according to Horowitz, that a representation which is “coarse, low, or vulgar” is not obscene as Fruits was written in medical language, and should be exempt. He believed that “To apply a different standard to obscenity - that a work of art is of “an immoral tendency” - endangers the society”, according to Horowitz. Knowlton believed that his third prosecution stemmed from a campaign against Freethinkers conducted by Massachusetts ministers led by Mason Grosvenor. To nobody’s surprise, Grosvenor was a Congregationalist - a Calvinist, like Comstock after him (1).

Knowlton was tried three times in Greenfield - the first two trials ended in a hung jury, and the third trial resulted in dismissal. It was his last brush with the law, and he later developed a thriving medical practice, along with becoming a regular contributor to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (1).

It’s quite clear to note the political aspect of this subject: It was the Hamiltonian north, which more often than not supported Whigs over Democrats, that tended to censor erotic literature and obscene writings the most.

And before we move on to talking about the man himself, we must talk about one more subject. One of the main targets of Comstock besides erotic literature during his crusades after the passage of the Comstock Act were the weekly sporting press. These publications emerged in 1841 in New York City - the site of the movement which led to the passage of the Comstock Act. These publications focused on discussing sexual matters, crime, and the other pleasures of the city and their dangers. However, they went out of business within two months as they were prosecuted under the common law of obscene libel. The New York Court of General Sessions relied on the two-volume 1830 edition of Starkie, which made no mention of Constitutional protection. This was despite the fact that these publications, specifically the Flash, warned its readers to not violate heterosexual norms and opposed abortion (1). 

Even though they were shut down, their spirit was somewhat revived in the National Police Gazette, the creation of journalist Thomas Wilkes. The Gazette, which was a major target of Comstock during his crusade, focused on crime reporting and other sensationalist topics. Wilkes was one of the writers charged during the crackdown of the sporting weeklies, and was originally given a suspended sentence on the condition that he would stop what he was doing. Wilkes noted, according to Horowitz, that the “law concerning the sale of obscene books and pictures” felt illogical. He felt that a double standard was being applied to him as he stated that obscene materials for purchase “are subject to the same penalties as libel, because they tend to promote licentiousness; while adultery and fornication, the very evils which their prosecution is intended to prevent, go scot free of the law. Is not this supremely absurd? In the latter case particularly, can the proposition stand, that it is criminal to incite an act, the actual commission of which is innocent by law?” He concluded by saying that “the sale of obscene papers is merely an offense against taste, according to the common law, or in other words, common opinion” (1).

This brings me to the main point of this article. The people Comstock went after - the Freethinkers and Free Lovers (who we will discuss later), did indeed have views that were radical and would still be considered radical today, but even if that is true - the Freethinkers and Free Lovers don’t need to be the good guys for Comstock to be a tyrant. I do not support the Freethinkers and Free Lovers, I have no sympathy with their causes other than the desire to get the government out of the bedroom and sexual affairs between men and women, but I also share those same sympathies with famous conservative activists such as the late Arizona senator Barry Goldwater:

So, no. I will not be falsely labeled a “leftist” or a “lolbert” seeing as folks like Goldwater share the same views that I do, and I have never voted for a single Democrat since I became eligible to vote. 

Now, it is finally time to talk about the man himself.

Chapter Three: “Will Someone Please Think Of The Children?”

“Human law is laid down for a multitude, the majority of whom consists of men not perfect in virtue. And therefore not all the vices from which the virtuous abstain are prohibited by human law, but only those graver excesses from which it is possible for the majority of the multitude to abstain, and especially those excesses which are to the hurt of other men, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained, as murder, theft, and the like.”

- Thomas Aquinas, The Moral Teaching of St. Thomas, Vol. 1 (1274)

“It is true that we have repeatedly recognized the governmental interest in protecting children from harmful materials. But that interest does not justify an unnecessarily broad suppression of speech addressed to adults. As we have explained, the Government may not reduc[e] the adult population to only what is fit for children."

- John Paul Stevens in Reno v. ACLU (1997)

“Where is the life, or property interest to debauch the young to be found in the Constitution? No man will dare libel our forefathers by suggesting that even for one moment they dreamed such a claim could be made under their form of government. Had they suspected the barest possibility of such an outrage, they would have framed an iron-bound section to prevent it.”

- Anthony Comstock

Now, here’s the part of the article you’ve all been waiting for. Buckle up, because this is going to be a very long chapter.

The idea that Comstock’s crusade against erotic literature wasn’t to protect the youth doesn’t come from Freethinkers or Free Lovers, it doesn’t come from “Lolbertarians”, and it doesn’t come from me either. It comes from Comstock himself. Upon the Comstock Act being signed into law in 1873 under the cloud of rampant crime, prostitution and corruption in Comstock’s home base of New York City, Comstock made clear what the most important objective of his crusade was. Not bringing abortionists and birth control advocates to heel, and certainly not destroying the pornography he reportedly jerked off to in secret. No. Would you like to know what Comstock’s primary occupation was?

Monitoring the goddamn mail:

“In some ways, Comstock was no different than these other postal agents. He investigated cases involving illegal use of the mails and received an annual commission that he was able to show to train conductors in order to travel for free throughout the country" (4).

Upon the Comstock Act being signed into law by President Grant, Comstock was made a special agent of the United States Postal Service with police powers and permission to carry a gun. In some way, the Comstock Act was sort of a prototype Patriot Act, as Comstock was basically spying on our mail to suss out “indecent” content being sent. 

Going back to discussing America’s political binary of Jefferson versus Hamilton, Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech noted that the era in which Comstock started his crusade was a time when “the Jeffersonian theory of the autonomy of the State was lost in the submergence of the Democratic Party in the years following the Civil War” (4). After the dissolution of the Whig Party, its members either joined the Democrats, or joined the new Republican Party. The Republican Party of this era was not like the GOP that we know today. This was the era of the Radical Republicans, and they were believers in the Hamiltonian ideal of central government statism. They were the big government leftists of their era. Comstock, who was a Republican hailing from a former Whig Party stronghold in Connecticut, also adhered to the Hamiltonian ideal. He was a lifelong and avowed advocate of centralized, authoritarian, top-down government (4).

Comstock’s crusade began well before the passage of the Comstock Act, however. New York in 1868 passed an anti-obscenity law which was a prototype of the Comstock Act, and it banned the publication of sexually explicit literature in the state. Comstock took advantage of this law in 1868, when he investigated the basement of Charles Conroy, one of the biggest distributors of erotic literature in New York. He returned with a police officer and Conroy was arrested. Even though Conroy was convicted, his sentence was suspended and was once again able to continue his distribution of erotic literature…for now (4).

Those who defend Comstock such as the Legalist Hamiltonian statists at Conservapedia often proclaim that “the Founding Fathers themselves would have banned pornography and other forms of sexual content! They passed the Alien and Sedition Acts after all!” To which I respond with a full-throated “BULL-FUCKING-SHIT they would have!” 

Those who have read the actual TEXT of the Alien and Sedition Acts, mind you, will note that it makes no mention of pornography or explicit literature. Robert Corn-Revere in his book The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder, states that obscenity was not a concept known to the Constitution’s architects, though they were familiar with European censorship of sedition and heresy. He also notes that no colonial obscenity laws were present at the time of this country’s founding in any of the thirteen colonies, and the framers of the Constitution rejected a proposal that the First Amendment be limited to just “decent” expression. Roger Sherman of Connecticut - Comstock’s home state, proposed that the First Amendment be neutered significantly, and that it should only protect “rights…of Speaking, writing and publishing their Sentiments with decency and freedom.” However, James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, rejected it, and framed the First Amendment with the following definition (5):

“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

The point of the First Amendment was to limit government power, not to promote a particular policy of value, as Corn-Revere notes. That’s not all, Madison’s initial draft of the First Amendment stated that “the full and equal rights of conscience shall not be in any manner, or on any pretext infringed”, and that the people “shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments, and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable” (5).

Also, point me to the part of the Constitution that states that porn, erotic literature, and other forms of sexual content in all forms of media must be banned…at all. I’LL WAIT!!

Benjamin Franklin wrote multiple stories that Comstock himself considered obscene, such as his 1745 letter Advice on a Young Man on Choosing a Mistress, his 1747 story Speech of Polly Baker, and his 1781 essay A Letter to the Royal Academy at Brussels, but these did not bother the rest of the Founders (5).

Also, the famous Italian Catholic theologian, Saint Thomas Aquinas, made clear that the law should not punish men for practicing vices which do not harm other people (25). Aquinas also wrote in defense of prostitution and other sexual vices when the papal states debated banning it (26):

This hyper-legalist view of sex that we now see on both the American Left and Right did not come to be until the rise of Calvinism in the 1500s.

However, Comstock felt that he knew better than the Father of the Constitution and Aquinas. Even though he had little to no success in arresting dealers of erotic literature, he studied the trade carefully and contemplated how to best achieve his results of creating a “pure” society. Make no mistake, Comstock was an authoritarian in waiting. He also realized that he needed serious help if he wanted to achieve his desired utopia. And for that he turned to the British. England adopted an Obscene Publications Act in 1857, which meant that any material found to be obscene would be seized and destroyed. However, what really helped Comstock in his crusade was an 1868 English court case called Regina v. Hicklin. Under the Hicklin ruling, it applied to anything that “depraves and corrupts those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort might fall.” Under Hicklin’s definition of obscenity, a single word or passage was enough to convict someone. Community standards or a book’s literary merit was considered irrelevant. It asked “whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences” (2)(4)(5).

However, Britain is not America, and most importantly, Britain has no First Amendment or any amendment protecting freedom of speech. Comstock felt that he knew what the Founders meant better than even the Founders themselves did. He felt that the United States should follow British law - the country that we won our independence against and warred with a second time in the War of 1812. He supported the Hicklin ruling, calling it “one of the most remarkable cases on record”, and after the passage of the Comstock Act, he successfully convinced American judges to apply it in court cases. Hicklin’s concept of obscenity had no bounds, and it gave the government full power to enforce “morality” (4)(5).

Doesn’t Comstock’s support for the Hicklin ruling sound similar to all the comments from those on the left suggesting that we need to be more like Europe? Except the whole “voting on one day only, no mail-in ballots, and voter ID requirements” stuff. But other than that, run and don’t walk, folks! However, what Comstock didn’t realize is that even the English court in Hicklin agreed that “the circumstances of the publication should determine whether the law had been violated” (5).

What Comstock needed to carry out his Cultural Revolution was massive financial and organizational backing. And, he got a ton of it. In 1872, Comstock was sought after by none other than that only organization more puritan than him - the YMCA. Remember them? The leader of the YMCA, Morris K. Jesup convinced Comstock to join them, as they would also assist him in his crusade against erotic literature. Like Comstock, Jesup was also from Connecticut, and was also a Congregationalist, which as I’ve explained earlier is a CALVINIST denomination. It was the YMCA who Comstock relied on to help him get Congress to pass his anti-obscenity law (2)(4)(5).

One of the incidents that would spur Comstock to get Congress to pass his much desired anti-obscenity law was the one involving feminist and free love activists Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin. Both women were anything but the people to look up to regarding freedom of speech and sexuality, especially as their weekly newspaper, the Woodhull and Claflin Weekly, was the first to publish the Communist Manifesto and both women were supporters of Karl Marx (2)(4)(5). But for this article, we are not concerned about the political leanings of Woodhull and Claflin, because as I’ve explained earlier, the Freethinkers and Free Lovers do not need to be the good guys for Comstock to be bad. 

In their November 2, 1872 issue of their newspaper, the two women accused Congregationalist pastor Henry Ward Beecher of having an affair with Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of Beecher’s friend Theodore Tilton. Copies of that issue sold like hotcakes, as over 150,000 copies were sold in a matter of days. This did not sit well with Comstock, as he saw a fellow Calvinist being persecuted by feminists. He arranged to have clerks from Beecher’s Church purchase copies of the Weekly to have them delivered by mail, invoking the jurisdiction of the 1865 federal law passed by Lincoln, which was revised in 1872 to include more materials such as postcards. Comstock secured a warrant to arrest the women, and with the help of the U.S. district attorney of the Southern District of New York, got Federal marshals to arrest them (2)(4)(5).

They were later released on bail, and then Comstock had them arrested a second time when Woodhull gave a speech titled “The Naked Truth - Thirty Days in the Ludlow Street Jail,” where she denounced her arrest as a violation of the First Amendment. Woodhull and Claflin’s lawyer, William F. Howe, cross-examined Comstock to get him to explain why the November 2nd issue of the Weekly was obscene, and Comstock seemed unable to put up a valid excuse as to why it was. The case was ultimately dismissed, with the Judge ruling that the law did not apply to newspapers (2)(4)(5).

It was a massive defeat for Comstock, and it only emboldened him to fight harder.

1873 is when Comstock set out for Washington. During this time, Washington, D.C. was in the middle of a massive bribery scandal called the Crédit Mobilier scandal, and Congress was in desperate need of an issue to distract from it and clean up its reputation. It is because of this scandal that Comstock saw an opportunity. Comstock was bankrolled by not just Jesup and the YMCA, but also the American elites of their time - J.P. Morgan, William E. Dodge Jr., Samuel Colgate (the founder of the Colgate corporation), and Alfred Barnes (the “Barnes” of what would eventually become bookstore chain Barnes & Noble) (2)(4). During his trips to Washington in early 1873, Comstock appeared in Congress as a special lobbyist for a committee of the YMCA called the Committee for the Suppression of Vice. To convince Congress to pass the law he so desired, he frequently displayed exhibits in the Capitol Building called the “Chamber of Horrors”, where he would display contraceptives, racy playing cards, erotic literature, erotic pictures, and sex toys before various committees (2)(4). 

This captivated the Radical Republican-controlled Congress, and Comstock got to work on drafting the bill. He lobbied House speaker James G. Blaine, representative Clinton Merriam, and Minnesota senator William Windon to introduce the bill in the House and Senate respectively. However, the most prominent figure who helped Comstock draft the bill and ensure that it was legally sound was none other than Supreme Court Justice William Strong. Like Comstock, Strong was also from Connecticut, and he too was a descendent of the Calvinist Puritans (5). Strong once backed an amendment to add references to God and Jesus in the Constitution, and supported resolutions that would have allowed the legal enforcement of Christian morality (2)(4).

When the measure was introduced by Merriam, there was no floor debate and most members of Congress had no idea what was even in the legislation. An effort to send the bill back to committee so the contents of the legislation could be read by Congress failed by seven votes. The Comstock Act was passed on March 3, 1873, and three days later Comstock was made a special agent of the United States Postal Service with police powers and permission to carry a gun. And so, the true crackdown had begun (2)(4)(5).

Then, the YMCA’s Committee for the Suppression of Vice later became an independent organization in which Comstock controlled, simply known as:

The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

The incorporation of this new organization, combined with the new Comstock Act, gave it substantial powers. The incorporation documents filed with the New York State Legislature states the following:

“[t]he police force of the City of New York, as well as of other places, where police organizations exist, shall, as occasion may require, aid this corporation, its members or agents, in the enforcement of all laws which now exist or which may hereafter be enacted for the suppression of vice” (2)(4)(5).

Comstock not only had federal authority to arrest individuals suspected of obscenity, local and state police forces answered to him and his organization as well. Have I reminded you all lately that the police are NOT your friends? 

Even worse, the definition of obscenity under Comstock’s law did NOT require any proof of public endangerment, or even proof of any individual physical, mental, or emotional harm. Under this law, lust inducement just by itself was illegal. As Werbel described it, “this new definition perfectly expressed a very particular blend of Christian “divine law” and secular administration that derived not from the moral wellsprings of New York State or the District of Columbia, but rather from the theocratic culture of antebellum Connecticut, in which Comstock, Jesup, and Strong had all been raised” (4). A direct violation of the Constitution. And if that wasn’t juicy enough for you, the man who brought the bill to the Senate floor was GOP senator William A. Buckingham who, like Comstock, is ALSO from Connecticut! What conflict of interest? 

What Comstock had accomplished was legally sanctioned jurisdiction to enforce Calvinist doctrine regarding sexuality. Anyone who even merely facilitated the arousal of sexual thoughts other than for procreative purposes within marriage could now be prosecuted under federal law (4). Not only does that sound tyrannical, because it is, it also has a borderline feminist feel to it. That’s not all, either. This new law allowed Comstock to arrest anyone without a warrant (4). Even worse, Comstock also took and destroyed the evidence before it could be seen by a judge or jury (4). Is this America or Communist China?

Fortunately for the NYSSV and its backers, Comstock was later made a martyr when he went to arrest Charles Conroy again in 1874 under the new law that Comstock managed to convince Congress to pass. Conroy has mailed erotic literature from sixteen different post offices using nineteen different aliases, which is what prompted Comstock to arrest him. Conroy responded by stabbing Comstock in the face, leaving a permanent scar on it. However, Comstock still managed to subdue him, and he was finally convicted (2)(4). The authoritarian beast inside Comstock had finally got out.

The first major target for Comstock after Woodhull, Claflin, and Conroy was free love activist Ezra Heywood (pictured above), who published a 23-page pamphlet called Cupid’s Yokes, which promoted sexual freedom and gender equality. However, barely anything remotely sexual was even present in the pamphlet, other than the clinical references of words like “semen” and “coition.” However, Comstock did not care, and he prosecuted him three separate times for publishing and selling Cupid’s Yokes. Oh, and I should also add that most of Heywood’s pamphlet was dedicated to criticizing Comstock’s OBSCENITY law and for challenging Comstock’s world view (5). However, Heywood was at one point pardoned by President Rutherford B. Hayes, who didn’t think that Heywood had committed any crime by publishing the pamphlet (5).

Another major target of Comstock was D.M. Bennett, the founder and owner of The Truth Seeker, a periodical free-thought publication which is still being published today. It was a publication dedicated to “science, morals, free thought, free discussions, liberalism, sexual equality, labor reform, progression, free education, and whatever tends to elevate and emancipate the human race”, according to Bennett himself (5). Like Heywood, Bennett was a major critic of Comstock. He was also an atheist, and published criticisms of organized religion and scientific articles such as “How Do Marsupials Propagate Their Kind?” by A.B. Bradford (5). Bennett also sought to get the Comstock Act repealed, and criticized Comstock: “This man has evinced the disposition of hatred and cruelty that a few centuries ago would have made a first-class Torquemada, Calvin, Alva, Charles IX, or Matthew Hopkins.” He also asked “whether the Church has ever had a cruel zealot in his employ who has labored with more resolution and zest than Comstock” (5). 

Comstock also had him arrested, and it was seen as an extreme overreach, as the idea for prosecuting a publisher for criticizing Christianity or publishing a scientific paper describing the mating habits of possums and kangaroos raised eyebrows even at that time. Former Illinois Attorney General Robert G. Ingersoll criticized the arrest of Bennett by Comstock, even stating his intent to defend Bennett in not just the courts, but the court of public opinion as well (5). As a result, the case was dropped and Bennett was released. This is incredibly ironic, as Ingersoll was a Republican and also was a Congregationalist, like Comstock! 

Bennett then continued his criticism of Comstock, and even turned to criticizing the elites who supported Comstock, such as the only man more prudish than Comstock himself - Samuel Colgate. He labeled Colgate a hypocrite by stating that Colgate’s product Vaseline could be used as a contraceptive. This embarrassed Colgate, who withdrew advertisements of Vaseline and freethinkers then staged a boycott of the product (2)(4). Bennett continued his outspoken criticism of Comstock by standing up for Ezra Heywood when he pledged in the pages of The Truth Seeker to send copies of Cupid’s Yokes to anyone who wanted it. I should also note that Bennett was not a fan of Heywood’s free love views, and he still decided to defend him anyway. This time, Comstock finally had him charged and imprisoned thanks to a tainted jury and the court citing Hicklin to convict Bennett. A petition from the National Liberal League to have him released from prison garnered over 200,000 signatures, and the organization sent it to President Hayes. Comstock, predictably, flipped his fucking shit. He went to the White House and pressured the President to deny Bennett a pardon (5). The judge in the case against Bennett defended Comstock, stating that “freedom of the press does not include freedom to use the mails for the purpose of distributing obscene literature, and no right of privilege of the press is infringed by the exclusion of obscene literature from the mails” (5). The judge was merely paraphrasing Comstock’s thoughts on the First Amendment, as Comstock himself insisted that “freedom to speak or print does not imply the right to say or print that which shocks decency, corrupts the morals of the young, or destroys all faith in God” (5).

Comstock wasn’t arresting pornographers, he was arresting and jailing political opponents (2). And before you decide to call this critique “one-sided”, or that using the term “SJW” to describe Comstock is politically illiterate, or that this is how all Western nations acted towards sexuality back then: This was very much a prevailing view of Comstock…EVEN IN HIS OWN TIME (4). One newspaper, the New York Daily Tribune, described Comstock’s investigative techniques by saying that “The Comstock method involves a distinct and more questionable element; the tempting of persons into breaking the law in order to prosecute them for it.” Comstock was even criticized by Conservative artists like William Merritt Chase, who even supported a proposal to raise money to send Comstock to Europe to view art galleries in order to improve his “taste and judgment” (4). 

Comstock and his allies also targeted plays which were targeted specifically for adult audiences. Specifically the case of Jake and Belle Berry, who Comstock targeted for holding plays involving themes of sexuality. Comstock, the NYSSV, and a new organization called the Society for the Suppression of Crime (SPC), got police to shut down the plays and charged Jake Barry with maintaining a “disorderly house.” Witnesses and even police officers who attended the show agreed that there were no immoral or obscene acts being performed. The SPC and Comstock claimed that actresses were soliciting male members of the audience. However, they were the only ones who were making those claims and there was insufficient evidence to back it up. But the SPC and Comstock got a sympathetic judge and jury pool, and he sentenced Jake Berry to eight months (4). Talk about jury tainting. 

Towards the end of Comstock’s life, a play by George Bernard Shaw called “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” was also targeted. The play was banned in England because of its subject matter, as the story was about prostitution. Even though the play itself promoted a moralistic take and was not considered obscene, and children were refused admission as ticket sales were age-restricted to adults only, under the Comstock Act and the Hicklin decision, any creative work that discussed prostitution as a subject was automatically considered pornography, even if no sexual acts were being performed, and in the case of this play, there were none. The play was stopped after the first performance, but not by Comstock. Instead, the NYPD shut it down at Comstock’s behest, and Shaw threw a fit in the papers, giving a scathing indictment of Comstock: “Comstockery is the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States”, and that “Hell is paved with good intentions, not bad ones” (4).

Again, have I reminded you all lately that the police are NOT your friends? However, the suppression was short lived, and Shaw’s play became a massive hit in New York that audience lines were long and tickets were being sold at a premium. Even though Comstock went to court to have the play suppressed, he was not successful (5). 

Not only that, Comstock also targeted dime detective novels and crime stories in newspapers, claiming that they inspired the youth to turn to violence. Comstock thought that these novels were “products of corrupt minds that are the eggs from which all kinds of villanies are hatched”, and that the stories these novels present “breed vulgarity, profanity, loose ideas of life, impurity of thought and deed” (5)(12). He cited medical authorities of the era who agreed with him, but he relied only on anecdotal accounts to prove his claims. As mentioned before, Comstock targeted the National Police Gazette, which was a forerunner to men’s lifestyle magazines. Like the sporting weeklies of the 1840s, the Gazette focused on discussing sexual matters, crime, and the other pleasures of the city and their dangers. Comstock met with its manager, Richard K. Fox, and demanded that he remove a section focusing on seductions, rapes, brothels, and other sex-related crimes. As a result, Fox reduced the number of stories focusing on sex-related crimes, and would paint Comstock in a positive light to avoid further crackdowns from him (4). Comstock thought that everyone was “in imminent danger from schoolboys crazed by the accursed blood-and-thunder story papers” (5). Does any of this sound familiar to anything we’ve seen in the modern day to you? Case in point:

Jack Thompson would later pluck a page from Comstock and do the exact same to video games in the early 2000s. Also, here’s a fun fact for you: like Comstock before him, Jack Thompson was a Presbyterian, which is a CALVINIST sect! See what I’m getting at here? The American Left and Right’s views on sex and violence in entertainment are based on Calvinist teachings.

And to go further back in history before Thompson, Comstock’s crusade against dime store novels and the sporting weeklies would ultimately inspire the war against comic books in the 1950s waged by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham.

Wertham was very similar to Comstock in how he carried out his crusade against the comic book industry. Unlike Comstock, Wertham was a left-wing progressive and worked with the Democratic Party to censor comic books.

The origins of Wertham’s crusade go back to the 1948 Supreme Court case Winters v. New York, when the Supreme Court had struck down an 1884 New York law which prohibited publications that featured “pictures and stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust, or crime.” The 1884 law had direct ties to Comstock, as New York adopted it in response to Comstock 1883 book Traps For The Young (5)(23). On the same day that the Supreme Court issued the Winters decision, Time Magazine published an article on Wertham’s criticisms of comic books titled “Puddles of Blood”, marking Wertham’s debut in the field (5).

Wertham made ridiculous accusations of comics that Comstock would be proud of. He also had notable allies from the Frankfurt School of thought including Herbert Marcuse, the pre-eminent theorist of the New Left who blamed pop culture and comics for creating a “false consciousness” and “destroying the inner life among the masses” (5). Wertham compared Superman to Nazi propaganda (5), and like Comstock he scoffed at the idea that censoring comics constituted a First Amendment violation. Also like Comstock, he too thought that he knew better than James Madison, as he denounced the First Amendment and stated that “the framers of the Constitution and the amendments would certainly be surprised if they knew that these guarantees are used to sell children stories with pictures in which men prowl on the streets and dismember beautiful girls” (5). 

Wertham was frighteningly successful. The Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), the Catholic Church, and even the Boy, Girl, and Cub Scouts initiated anti-comic book campaigns and took part in mass burnings of comics, echoing the book burnings of Comstock’s NYSSV and later the Nazis and Soviets (5). Laws to regulate comics began to pop up in fourteen states and over fifty cities, including Michigan and California, all at the behest of Wertham, who was consulted by Los Angeles County to help create an ordinance that would ban sales of comics to minors (5). The Supreme Court would strike down some of these anti-comics ordinances in cases such as Butler v. Michigan and Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, and even New York governor and former GOP presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey vetoed a law that would prohibit sales of comics to minors, citing the Winters decision (5). Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in Butler v. Michigan explained that the court struck down a Michigan law prohibiting the sale of any book “tending to the corruption of the morals of youth” because it “reduced the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children'' (5). 

The 1954 Comic Book hearings, which were called by Democrat Estes Kefauver (who would eventually become Adlai Stevenson’s running-mate in the 1956 presidential election), was where Wertham scored his biggest victory. Two days before the hearings began, Wertham published his own take on Comstock’s Traps For The Young called Seduction of The Innocent, which contained Wertham’s findings and made a plea to ban the sale of comics to minors. The book denounced comics, along with legislators, judges, psychologists, and anyone else who disagreed with Wertham. He also cited Comstock-era precedents in an attempt to shame Congress into doing his bidding (5).

Wertham was victorious, and comics fans in America got saddled with the draconian Comics Code Authority. It was such a strict rating system that it banned the following: terms like “terror” and “horror” in titles, themes including zombies, vampires, and werewolves, no extreme violence or gore, no attack on religion was allowed (sound familiar?), no details or methods of crime, police, judges, and other public officials could not be portrayed in a negative light, no harsh language or sexual content was allowed, no “salacious drawings of women”, and love stories most promote the sanctity of marriage (5). The Comics Code was so destructive to the comics industry that horror comics were banned, along with crime comics. The number of comic book titles also dropped by 40%, from 500 in 1952 to 300 in 1955, and the number of comics on the stands declined by more than half. Over 800 comic writers and artists lost their jobs as a result of the Comics Code (5).

Unfortunately for Wertham, his work was later debunked as bullshit. In 2010, when Wertham’s papers were finally revealed to the public, Prof. Carol Tilley found that Wertham had “manipulated, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence.” Tilley also discovered that Wertham deliberately misstated the ages of children, combined quotations taken from different subjects to make it appear that they came from the same person, and he omitted and even invented key details. She also noted that Wertham’s accounts ignored other factors that might explain delinquency, such as a history of family violence, substance abuse, gang membership, and low IQ. Tilley also revealed that Wertham exaggerated the number of patients from which he drew his conclusions, which was only in the hundreds and not the “thousands” that he claimed. Some weren’t even his own patients, but rather colleagues who he never met or personally observed (5).

Even with that, Wertham emulated Comstock’s playbook in his crusade against comics, and was highly successful. As Corn-Revere notes, Wertham “exhibited absolute moral certainty of the rightness of his cause; equated any opposition with love of the vice he was committed to destroy; denounced and discredited any adversaries (or even those who declined to fully embrace his conclusions); poisoned the debate with over-the-top rhetoric and invective; propounded his aesthetic preferences as scientific fact; vigorously pursued publicity; wildly exaggerated the threat; puffed up his own importance; and portrayed himself as the victim of evil forces” (5).

Now, let’s go back to Comstock himself. Comstock’s influence was spreading all across the country. The states began passing their own variants of the Comstock Act, and by 1920, all but two states had passed Comstock-style obscenity statutes. Anti-vice societies similar to Comstock’s started popping up across the country, in states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and even California (2)(5). 

As mentioned before, Comstock was propped up by the elites of the time, very much like the modern leftist activists of our era. As I mentioned earlier, Comstock was backed by the YMCA, J.P. Morgan, William E. Dodge Jr., Samuel Colgate, and Alfred Barnes. Over 80% of the men who contributed to Comstock and the NYSSV were considered upper or upper-middle class, “including merchants, businessmen, financiers, and professionals” (2). 32.5% of Comstock’s supporters were millionaires (2). Of all the elites who supported Comstock, none were as powerful or as influential as Samuel Colgate, the only man more prudish than Comstock himself. In many ways, Colgate was the Zuckerberg or Soros of the NYSSV, as he always visited various jails across the country to bail out Comstock whenever he was charged with assault, and Colgate even went so far to bribe defendants to drop charges against Comstock (4). Colgate also used his connections within the Evangelical community to organize campaigns in support of Comstock and the NYSSV (4). 

The primary excuse Comstock and the NYSSV used to censor and destroy erotic literature, photographs, art, dime novels, and crime stories was to protect the youth. However, the question of whose children were endangered remains, according to Beisel. Comstock played on the fears of working-class criminality to win over elite families, who supported him financially due to concerns about children of their own class. It is revealed that Comstock threatened his supporters with the “specter of lust-crazed juveniles committing various violent crimes and gambling-obsessed workers stealing from their employers.” As mentioned earlier, Comstock targeted the National Police Gazette, and claimed that it along with detective novels incited criminal acts among the youth. In one case, Comstock blamed “loving parents” for the death of their son, claiming they “did not appreciate the dangers of reading adventure novels and because they gave their son too much freedom.” Comstock even cited examples of successful juvenile criminals, even citing cases where there was no evidence that crime stories inspired them to commit criminal acts. Like Wertham after him, Comstock sought to link crime to erotic literature and dime novels (2)(4).

However, it is debatable if Comstock actually thought that dime novels, erotic-themed plays, erotic literature, and the publications he targeted were obscene or a danger to social morality (5), or if he actually cared about protecting America’s youth. When you look at it closely, Comstock used obscenity allegations to persecute his political opponents and critics and to force his own statist vision on America. Protecting the youth was merely an excuse. How do I know this? Because in 1878, there was an attempt to get Congress to repeal the Comstock Act. The National Liberal League started a petition for repeal of the act, which got over 70,000 signatures. The petition described the Comstock Act as a clear violation of First Amendment, that the First Amendment required the government to remain neutral in the field of ideas, and that it was used “for the purposes of moral and religious persecution, whereby the dearest and most precious rights of the people are being grievously violated under the forms of legal inquisition, fines, forfeitures, and imprisonment”, and that “all attempts of civil government, whether State or national, to enforce or favor particular religious, social, moral, or medical opinions, or schools of thought or practice, are not only unconstitutional but ill-advised, contrary to the spirit and progress of our age, and almost certain in the end to defeat any beneficial objects intended” (5)(6). Comstock, of course, lost his temper, and neither the House or Senate decided to overturn the Comstock Act and face the wrath of Comstock and his wealthy donors (6).

A good chunk of the stuff Comstock targeted weren’t even that bad, and wouldn’t be considered pornographic, even among most social conservatives. Here are some examples of photographs and artwork Comstock targeted (4):

I don’t see how any of this would be considered “obscene” or “pornographic.” Which really shows that Comstock went after anything even if it showed the slightest bit of skin. It’s quite clear that he was censoring just to censor in a way to force his own theocratic vision on the country over baseless claims that children are being harmed from exposure to sexually explicit content which leads to all sorts of civilizational destruction which failed to materialize in the past century as restrictions on sexual content and violence in media were continuously, but carefully, loosened. 

There have been examples of nations who have used fears of delinquency and degeneracy caused by art, literature, film, music, and more as a convenient method of organizing resistance to seize the levers of power and “purify” the culture of a nation.

Countries like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Communist China (17)(27)(28). Not exactly the coziest of company, might I add. But it’s actually an even bigger insult to the countries in question! The book burnings and censorship of literature that occurred in Nazi Germany and the USSR, which likewise expanded state power immensely afterwards, never for a moment rose to the levels Comstock prescribed. Don’t believe me? Watch this:

It is estimated that the Nazis burned around 80,000-90,000 books during their book burning spree (17). It is estimated that there are about 2,909 books in a ton, meaning the Nazis burned about an estimated 31 tons of books. Would you like to know how much Comstock destroyed?

Comstock ended up destroying “134,000 pounds of books, 194,000 “bad pictures and photographs,” 6,250 microscopic pictures, and 60,300 ‘articles made of rubber for immoral purposes, and used by both sexes.’ Also counted among the haul were 4,750 newspapers, 130,275 advertising circulars, and 20,000 letters (4). And if you want to do the math, 134,000 pounds is a whopping SIXTY-SEVEN TONS. 67! Which is around 195,000 books! MORE THAN DOUBLE the amount of books that the Nazis burned! Sure, there were book burnings which occurred centuries before in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, but even they never boasted ANYTHING approaching this level of Cultural Revolution-type destruction. 

Was Anthony Comstock a despot? Put it this way:

Pol Pot would later pluck a page from Comstock and use many of his tactics in crafting his “Year Zero” campaign against the Cambodian populace, and I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t think Pol Pot was a despot:

"The idea behind Year Zero is that all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded and a new revolutionary culture must replace it, starting from scratch. All history of a nation or people before Year Zero is deemed largely irrelevant, as it will ideally be purged and replaced from the ground up."

Comstock may have had a different agenda and a different “revolutionary culture” he wanted built, but the underlying pathology - the feelings of moral superiority, the revulsion toward the “impurity” of the old order, the dehumanization of all its adherents (who are regarded as immoral), is exactly the same. Calvinism and Legalism also shares many of the same traits. 

And if that’s not enough for you…

Mao Zedong would also pluck a page from Comstock and also used many of the same tactics he used in his time in the Cultural Revolution, where Mao’s Red Guards would go out purging capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society, and I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t think Mao was a despot.

Comstock alone was willing to wage his own Cultural Revolution in the United States, and yet…that’s his only company: blood-thirsty genocidal dictators from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as East Asia, who used fears of “degeneracy” and “foreign influence” as an excuse to enact their own statist vision.

Welcome home, Anthony Comstock!!

Like the Puritans before him, it’s easy to tell that Comstock was anything but “based and trad” as hopeless online Gen Z Tradcons would like you to believe. Comstock, like his Puritan ancestors before him, was basically a Muslim with a cross.

Though that’s actually a bit of an insult to the Islamic world, considering that porn and erotic media is legal in at least a few majority-Muslim countries, such as Turkey and Azerbaijan. 

Well, I think it’s safe to say that this chapter has gone on long enough. Now, we can finally move on to the long-awaited conclusion you’ve all been waiting for:

Chapter Four: The Legacy of Comstock and Calvinism

“Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” - David Horowitz

“While on one hand a statue or a picture may impose reverence or sentiment of the purest or most tender sort, to another it may merely bring images of base desire and unlicensed indulgence. Must those who look upon art from the standpoint of pure appreciation be deprived of that best of all pleasures because others of prurient and unclean imaginations can find nothing that is elevating in the most perfect types of human beauty?”

- General di Cesnola, Curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1887)

“Classical, standard, literary, and medical works are all indictable regardless of the author’s intent if sold in such a manner as to reach and corrupt the young and inexperienced.”

- Anthony Comstock, Morals Versus Art (1887)

Now, here’s where we get REALLY SPICY.

As I previously explained in the previous chapter, Anthony Comstock’s crusade against “obscenity” was not waged to protect the youth from the dangers of sexuality, but it was arguably waged to neuter the First Amendment and suppress artistic freedom because it offended his religious sensibilities (4). After Comstock had managed to drive the porn industry mostly underground in 1877, he then turned to targeting fine art, gambling, medical texts, classic literature, and of course more plays that managed to slip under his radar. Comstock still needed to make arrests so that the elites would continue to fund the NYSSV’s $10,000 budget - the equivalent of around $300,000 in today’s money (6).

After the Hicklin test was used successfully to prosecute D.M. Bennett, Comstock felt secure to go after the arts and classical literary works with sexual themes such as Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron (4). Comstock also went after one of America’s most famous poets - Walt Whitman. Comstock justified his crusade on the basis that he was protecting children, but that excuse began to fall apart once he took aim at Whitman. Instead, he had to make a baseless claim that “sexuality in high culture” was “demoralizing” (2). Comstock specifically targeted Whitman’s most famous work, Leaves of Grass. Comstock and his allies in the Boston-based New England Society for the Suppression of Vice (NESSV)  agreed that Leaves of Grass was obscene, and while they had no intention of arresting Whitman, they ultimately decided to suppress circulation of Whitman’s book. Whitman had no chance of seeing his book being sold in Boston, as Boston was even more notorious for censorship than New York was - just look up the phrase “Banned in Boston.” Also, the NESSV was even more prudish than even Comstock himself. But that is another story for another time, one that I recommend you check out on your own time (2).

Comstock also took aim at photographic reproductions of art on the grounds that they were obscene, which damaged his reputation even more and generated massive outrage among the general public. This occurred in 1882 when he arrested August Muller for making photographic reproductions of art. The New York Court of Appeals upheld Muller’s conviction, as he stated that “It would be a proper test of obscenity in a painting or statue whether it is naturally calculated to excite in a spectator impure imaginations.” However, Comstock ignored the other part of the ruling, which stated: “It is evident that mere nudity in painting or sculpture is not obscenity. Some of the great works in painting and sculpture as all know represent nude human forms. It is false delicacy and mere prudery which would condemn and banish from sight all such objects as obscene, simply on account of their nudity” (2).

Comstock ignored it, and believed that his victory in the Muller case meant that he was free to continue his crusade. However, it would ultimately lead to his downfall, as this would lead him to break the one rule he set for himself: do not target the rich. This next mistake would damage his reputation beyond repair, and it would even bring the Hicklin rule under scrutiny, as public opinion changed so drastically that judges and juries rarely agreed to use the Hicklin standard in future cases. This blunder occurred in 1887, when he went after wealthy art dealer Edmund Knoedler of the Knoedler Gallery on New York City’s 5th Avenue, one of the oldest commercial art galleries in the United States (4).

Comstock arrested Knoedler on November 11, 1887 for selling reproductions of nude French art by artists such as Bouguereau, Cabanel, Henner, and Lefebvre (2). Comstock was torn apart in the press and by various artists organizations such as the Society of American Artists and the National Academy of Design for his arrest of Knoedler, and the general consensus emerged that in Comstock’s eyes, nudity was obscenity (2). He was criticized heavily for his inability to explain why black and white reproductions are more harmful to children than the originals on the walls of rich people’s homes or museums (2). The Society of American Artists made the plea that photographic reproductions were valuable for artists who did not have the means to travel to Europe, and penned a rebuke in multiple newspapers that “serious art required study of the nude, photographs of works of art held educational value for the public, nude figure painting was among the ‘highest forms of art,’ and professional artists were best fitted to police ‘art and morality’ themselves. The cause of higher education in the United States demanded that the NYSSV stay away from art” (4). 

When the Knoedler trial commenced in March 1888, the judge in the case declared that only a whopping TWO of the 37 photographs submitted were obscene, and both of these were reproductions of paintings illustrating scenes of prostitution, one of which was Henri Gervex’s Rolla. Comstock was unaware that the Rolla “illustrates Alfred de Musset’s cautionary poem about a young man about to commit suicide after luring a poor young woman into prostitution and spending all his family’s money on gambling” (4). Despite the painting’s moral message, the judge and Comstock weren’t convinced that it wasn’t obscene.

Ultimately, Knoedler pleaded guilty, and was given a plea bargain of only a $50 fine (4). However, he must have been pissing himself laughing while he did it, considering that his trial was a public relations nightmare for Comstock and the NYSSV. 

And of course, there will likely be some Tradcon midwit mockery in the comments section with stuff like “LOL, I wish Trump or DeSantis had done that!” You morons don’t even know what you’re asking for. This was less like DeSantis and conservative governors taking action against woke LGBTQ books being in school libraries and more like leftist judges declaring that Trump’s First Amendment rights are “Not Absolute”, Trump being criminally charged in Georgia for questioning the results of the 2020 election, or the most recent crusades by rabid leftists in Michigan to suppress talk of voter fraud. Considering that newspapers, books, plays, and art were very much the social media, blog posts, films, and video games of their era.

Be careful what you wish for, you may already have it.

Comstock may have won the battle, but he ultimately lost the war. It was thanks to his censorship that nudity in art became more popular, and the threat of an obscenity prosecution by Comstock would generate massive sales and profits. It was arguably when the term “sex sells” was born (4). Comstock’s reputation continued to decline so much that he even lost the sympathies of law enforcement and the courts, which led to him getting the most deserved ass-beating in history in 1906, when a former U.S. district attorney from West Virginia named Hugh Gordon Miller beat up Comstock right in the middle of a court hearing! (5) Miller was hired as a defense attorney for someone Comstock arrested, and Miller accused Comstock of setting up his client and allowing the true culprit to escape. Comstock quickly called Miller a liar, and Miller then proceeded to punch Comstock in the face multiple times. Even though Comstock pleaded to have Miller arrested, nobody in the judicial system felt bad for him and declined to press charges against Miller (4).

Eventually, Comstock died on September 21, 1915.. Even before his death his beliefs were challenged, most notably by lawyer Theodore Schroeder, a free speech advocate and Constitutional scholar who founded the Free Speech League. Schroeder and Comstock exchanged letters between one another challenging each other's beliefs, but they never met in person and did not debate one another. Schroeder reviewed both the trials of Ezra Heywood and D.M. Bennett, and concluded that obscenity law had boiled down to nothing other than a disagreement about literary style (5)(20). Schroeder believed that obscenity laws were unconstitutional because “they were not within any expressed or implied power of Congress to enact; such laws were void because they violated the First Amendment; the laws also violated the "due process" clause and the injunction against uncertain laws; and the obscenity laws violated the Constitutional guarantees against ex-post facto laws” (20). Schroeder believed the Comstock Act violated the constitutional guarantee of due process because he felt that they were so vague that those who were charged with violating it were “not sufficiently forewarned as to what behavior was illegal” (12). Schroeder felt that censorship of ideas, even sexual ones, was part of the desire to exact control over another. He feared that the desire to control what media others consume would reach “popularly accepted materials”, and that society would suffer from the lack of necessary information (12). 

With Schroeder’s beliefs and other court decisions, Comstock’s view of obscenity law was falling out of favor. The Hicklin test began to be challenged further and by 1933, it was no longer used as the generally applied rule in cases involving obscenity. The Hicklin test was overthrown in its entirety in 1957 in Roth v. United States, although the Supreme Court ruled in that case that obscenity was not protected by the First Amendment (5). Also, I might add that the majority on Roth was set by three Democrat-appointed justices and a GOP-appointed justice who was a registered Democrat. The Comstock laws were neutered further with the Supreme Court’s landmark 9-0 ruling in the 1969 case Stanley v. Georgia, and the Roth test was superseded in 1973 in Miller v. California. Even when Congress tried to bring back Comstock-era censorship enforcement with the passage of the Communications Decency Act in 1996, it was struck down as unconstitutional in Reno v. ACLU in 1997. The Supreme Court took this one step further in 2010 in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, which ruled that video games were protected speech under the First Amendment as other forms of media. Jack Thompson was even disbarred in 2008 for misconduct.

And from the looks of it, Comstock, and ultimately Calvinism, was defeated.

…or were they?

Anthony Comstock certainly did not create the idea of censorship, but his tactics are still being used today by a bunch of activists on the left and right. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Comstock’s playbook involves the following: “(1) rejecting "freedom of speech" as a value in its own right while denouncing the evil to be vanquished with blood-and-thunder metaphors; (2) proposing weak and malleable First Amendment standards to expand government control over "bad" speech or "unworthy" speakers; and (3) equating any opposition with love of the vice to be destroyed” (14).

The censors and despots that succeeded Comstock in not just America, but around the world, appear to have borrowed directly from Comstock’s tactics. I mentioned the Nazi book burning, Pol Pot’s “Year Zero”, Fredric Wertham’s crusade against comics, and of course Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. 

Case in point:

Not only are events such as the Cultural Revolution no different from what Comstock and the Calvinist Puritans did, but there is a strong case to be made that Socialism, and ultimately Communism, is derived from Calvinism and Legalism.

Frederick Engels wrote this 1892 essay discussing how Calvinism inspired early Socialists, including him and his lifelong friend and collaborator - Karl Marx. Calvin's desire to make God’s sovereignty his main concern in his theology made it so that Calvinists would do everything to prove they are a part of the elect, which ultimately inspired Socialism and eventually Communism (8). Hence, the argument can be made that leftism is just recycled Calvinism, as leftism and Communism both act like a religion (7)(10). Here are some examples explained by The Federalist’s Robby Starbuck:

• Forced adherence to the doctrines of the Church of Leftism, as those who fail to tow the party line become victims of Cancel Culture. Those who dissent are censored, discriminated against, shunned from certain schools or organizations, and even deprived of their careers, with their lives even being put in danger. The New York Times even put out an article that friends and family members who do not support or donate to left-wing causes should be excommunicated (10).
• The left polices speech, as they launch pressure campaigns against schools, corporations, and celebrities to make them tow the party line, and they work to ruin the lives of those who dares offer up a differing opinion (10).
• Groupthink is required, as if you don’t comply, you will be labeled as an -ist or -phobe (10).
• Forced to commit a public act of penance if it is found that you have committed a sin, such as being forced to get down on one’s knees and beg or publicly prostrating themselves (10).
• Public ritual, as the only possible redemption for those who do not adhere to the Church of Leftism is to get on one’s knees and convert to their religion (10).
• The Evangelists for the Church of Leftism are everywhere, as they have inserted themselves into television shows, sports, video games, movies, websites, social media, and more. Not a single consumer product comes without a free leftist sermon, as the left have injected their politics into just about everything these days (10).

Left-wing activist Herbert Marcuse, who was one of Fredric Wertham's closest allies in the war on comics in the 1950s, also plucked a page from Comstock in crafting his 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance. Marcuse believed that establishing true democracy requires “undemocratic means.” Marcuse believed in restricting political argument “so that the people would be capable of understanding the ‘real’ truth” (5).

Also, Marx’s Labor Theory of Value is really nothing more but a product of legalism. As I mentioned earlier, Legalism is the idea that policing all works will put you in God’s favor because you are fulfilling God's law. It emphasizes that one needs to perform certain deeds in order to gain salvation. It is the belief that Christians should abstain from practices that supposedly run contrary to Christian witness. If you believe that policing all works will put you in God’s favor because you are fulfilling his law, how is that any different from believing that your labor is what gives something its value?

Now, here’s the part where we get SPICY. Comstock also showed off the male feminist side of himself in his book Traps For The Young. Read this passage and compare it to some of the articles written by leftist game critics on Stellar Blade:

“There is nothing more on earth chaste or beautiful than a modest and chaste woman, unless it be that of innocent childhood, and that chastity every chivalrous man ought to defend and protect. The nude in art is a menace upon this chasity. The youth of this country today are being cursed by the dissemination of pictures where woman is exposed to vulgar gaze (Sound similar to all the “male gaze” comments being made by feminists?), through the medium of photography and art. There is nothing more repulsive than an unchaste woman, there is nothing more seductive than a beautiful woman. Art has been employed to reproduce and represent all of these characteristics” (2)(23).

Oh, and that’s not all. Ready for more?

Comstock argued that “when art excited youthful sexuality”, he argued that it would “fan the flames of secret desires.” He also thought that working-class men who looked at nudes were “a threat to respectable girls and women” (2)(23).

And here’s the big one, from his other book Morals Versus Art:

“Nude in art unclothes beautiful women. To thus expose her in public is to rob her of that modesty which is her most beautiful mantle. It is food for impure imaginations, and provokes comment among the evil-minded….by what right does a few selfish men….denude women for the inspections of others or seek to put these representations of nudity upon the open market for all classes to gaze on?” (2)(22).

UN. FUCKING. QUOTE.

Was Anthony Comstock a male feminist? Put it this way:

Anita Sarkeesian would later pluck a page from Comstock and use the exact same rhetoric to denounce attractive female characters in video games, and I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t think ol’ Anita isn’t a man-hating feminist (21):

“In her two part Women as Background Decoration series she explained how sexual objectification works to dehumanize women and how women as “passive objects of heterosexual male desire” became so prominent in gaming culture. The “camera” in video games will often play to the male gaze by zooming in on “non-playable female characters'” body parts, who are, in many cases, positioned only as peripheral things that exist “to be used and abused.” (She was, it should be noted, attacked online for using the term, “prostituted women,” when discussing games that fuse objectification with the exoticization of impoverished women, by having male characters travel through shanty towns populated by prostituted women in the global south.)

It’s important to remember that sexualization is not just about the amount of skin showing, but is instead connected to the question of whether or not a costume is eroticized for the express purpose of titillation.”

Female characters that are otherwise powerful — secret service agents, members of human rights organizations, etc. — can be put in sexy policewoman costumes, school girl costumes, and racialized costumes that exoticize women of color that are reminiscent of those patronizing sexy halloween costumes we see mass-produced every year. It’s a way for male players to disempower otherwise powerful female characters.”

I don’t know about you, but it sounds like Sarkeesian’s criticisms were ripped directly from Comstock’s writings. Her criticisms of attractive female characters in video games sound no different from Comstock’s complaints about nude art and erotic literature. Of course, it is unlikely that Sarkeesian herself was directly inspired by Comstock, but the parallels are blatantly obvious.

Radical left-wing feminist Catherine MacKinnon’s crusade against pornography was also based on Comstock’s tactics. She supported “a new model for freedom of expression” where “free speech does not readily protect the activities of Nazis, Klansmen, or pornographers, while doing nothing for their victims.” She supported censorship of sexual content to prevent discrimination, something that Anita Sarkeesian would later push in the 2010s. MacKinnon, like Comstock before her, also sought to decimate the First Amendment, and bashed those who defended it, stating that “Americans are taught to revere freedom of speech ‘by about the fourth grade’ and simply hang onto those beliefs as a matter of ‘personal faith’ (5). That’s not all, she even said that “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the First Amendment is construed as it is so men can have their pornography” (5). 

In 1985, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit struck down an anti-porn ordinance drafted by MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin as an exercise in “thought control” and a violation of the First Amendment. MacKinnon’s ordinance defined porn as “the graphic sexual subordination of women, whether in pictures or in words.” The court rejected it on First Amendment grounds, stating that “If the fact that speech plays a role in a process of conditioning were enough to permit governmental regulation, that would be the end of freedom of speech”, as well as the fact that speech that may “influence the culture and shape our socialization” is protected as speech because “any other answer leaves the government in control of all the institutions of culture, the great censor and director of which thoughts are good for us” (5).

However, that didn’t last long, as politicians on both the left and right have echoed MacKinnon and succeeded in getting Trojan Horse “age verification” bills passed, which will destroy online anonymity and make Online ID a reality. Safe to say that feminists like MacKinnon are actually winning now, unfortunately.

Oh, and did I mention that AOC & The Squad also support these age verification bills? Whenever the left and right agree on something, it’s almost always for your detriment.

Also, here’s another fact that proves my point that Comstock was an SJW: Comstock labeled French art as a “foreign foe” (2). Does that sound familiar at all? Let me refresh your memory:

Former Vice News reporter Hanako Montgomery would also pluck a page from Comstock and do the exact same thing to manga and anime, comparing it to child pornography in her infamous documentary, “Inside the Pedophilic Manga Industry in Japan.” Like Comstock, she denounced free speech and implied support for government control over "bad" speech or "unworthy" speakers, and considered the laws that protect works such as anime and manga to be a “loophole”. In her video, she interviewed Kazuna Kanajiri, a far-left transgender activist who is the chief director of PAPS, an organization for pornography and sexual exploitation survivors, and both Montgomery and Kanajiri agreed that adult-themed manga was a "violation of human rights." They also called for most adult-themed manga to be banned for believing that they cause sexual abuse of children, even though Kanajiri admitted that there is no evidence. 

Montgomery’s criticisms of manga and anime sound exactly like they were taken directly from Comstock and also Fredric Wertham. Also like Comstock and Wertham, Montgomery relied only on anecdotal accounts to prove her claims, and that she claimed that she was doing it to protect the youth. However, it is highly unlikely that Montgomery actually believes manga and anime are “child abuse” material, or a danger to social morality. In my opinion, Montgomery made this documentary as a way to undermine America’s relations with Japan and negatively influence Western opinion on Japan.

One more thing worth noting: Comstock also arrested four people from Japan during his crackdown. In 1909, six years before he died, Comstock arrested Kosen Takahashi, an illustrator for the Japanese-language publication Shin Sekai, for drawing a total of 48 erotic scenes, specifically of the Yaoi and Yuri genres (4).

You heard that correctly, folks. The ongoing Western puritan crusade against Japanese pop culture has been ongoing for 115 GODDAMN YEARS AND COUNTING.

And it’s not just Japan. Even Korean games are not safe from the Comstockian denouncement of attractive female characters in video games. Just take a look at what Western critics had to say about Stellar Blade:

Critics’ complaints about Eve’s design eerily resembles not just that of Comstock, but also Catherine MacKinnon and Anita Sarkeesian’s criticisms. The main goal of these attacks is not to stop the dehumanization of women, nor is it to protect the youth from the dangers of sexuality. It's about demonizing straight men and destroying heterosexuality. 

Let’s face it: the woke left would happily endorse a form of erotic media more degenerate than Fanny Hill as long as it meant that they get to dictate it. How do I know this? Because they already are!

The woke left are pushing the Transgender nonsense down our throats, as they managed to use Comstockian tactics against the creator of Guilty Gear, Daisuke Ishiwatari, to retcon one of the series’ characters - Bridget - from a male femboy to a transgender. 

After all, the vast majority of the erotic art and literature Comstock targeted was heterosexual in nature, and therefore was aimed at straight men. So it’s not surprising that the censorship laws that Comstock managed to get passed through Congress, as well as his censorship tactics, ultimately led to this.

And of course, it’s not just the left that's emulating Comstock. The Right is too.

One of the most prominent forces on the right that have been using Comstock’s tactics to decimate sexual content in media has been none other than the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), who is admittedly an easy target. They are an organization headed by Catholic activist Patrick Trueman, and they have been waging a battle against sex and violence in media for over half a century based on the feminist claims that it represents sexual subordination of women. Back in 2018, they managed to get Steam to remove adult content from their online store, including hentai visual novels. And of course, I mentioned that AOC & The Squad have recently partnered up with them. Fun times we’re entering. If you want to know more about NCOSE, click here, and here. 

There are lots of other examples as well, such as GOP legislators wanting to put a tax on M rated games in Pennsylvania. Congresswoman Diane Black (R-TN) blamed video games for a school shooting. The Christian conservative feminist group Concerned Women for America boycotted Kiki's Delivery Service, claiming that it promoted witchcraft. They also protested against Midway receiving grants to stay in Chicago because of Mortal Kombat. 

Factions on both the left and right want to suppress creative freedom in the arts. The methods and their reasons just differ. However, neither side wants to compromise and reach a middle ground.

The relationship between legalized porn, the rising popularity of video games and anime and falling crime rates has been well studied. Crime as a whole has been decreasing as porn became legal in much of the developed world in the latter half of the 20th century, as results from Japan and the Czech Republic have shown. Results from other nations, South Korea specifically, have shown that banning porn outright, whatever the legal and moral merits may be, might not actually be that great for society:

South Korea’s banned porn, and it appears to have done nothing to fix its awful fertility and marriage rates (the lowest in the world), and has resulted in increased crime rates in the country. Compare that to the Czech Republic, whose fertility rate is over two times higher than South Korea’s and is continuing to improve. It’s quite clear that taking the “Based TradLife” route in South Korea hasn’t worked out at all. Some say the Korean porn ban isn't harsh enough, but it's unlikely porn is the main cause of South Korea’s low marriage and fertility rates. Print and digital porn availability precedes the decline in fertility rates by a very long time.

After seeing the results in both Japan and the Czech Republic, one would think that the social conservatives on the right and the feminist and humanitarian activists on the left would find reasonable common ground on this one issue to help better society, but that is not the case here.

The recent attacks on pop culture by activists on the right like Matt Walsh, Gavin McInnes, Candace Owens, and others, show that the right is utterly delusional on how to take back the culture of the nation. Like Razorfist, I am of the belief that pop culture and politics should not be divorced from one another, as the right abandoning pop culture in the 1960s has led to a decline in their political and cultural influence. The left now controls the entertainment industry, and their political and cultural influence has only increased. Ever wonder why the left has worked tooth and nail to take over entertainment? This is why:

The right as a whole still refuses to get involved with pop culture, and still treats anime and video games as an afterthought. They still support porn bans, now through Trojan Horse “age verification” bills which are, whatever the case on the legal and moral merits may be, politically unpopular and also unconstitutional. They’re giving the left the battle on the terms they want to fight it. They don’t realize that they have to win the public debate, and that the best way to do that is to not support the least popular positions possible. They rile up an annoying vocal minority of the population, but as we’ve seen from Comstock’s foolish attempts to stamp out eroticism and how unpopular they were even in his time, the long-term consequences are disastrous and would have the exact opposite effect of “conserving” anything. Instead of moving conservatism towards something more nationalistic and pragmatic such as the Jeffersonian ideal, the bad actors on the right such as Walsh, Owens, McInnes, PaxTube, John Doyle, Conservapedia, and others have come to embody the last desperate gasp of Hamiltonian statism.

The left sometimes makes solid points about why porn and erotic media should be legal, but no longer connects them to any broader program for maintaining a healthy and orderly society. Instead, the left is now packaged with absolutely disastrous policies such as racial activism, cancel culture, transgender activism, demographic change and cultural dissolution. Feminist historian Anna Louise Bates believed that porn degraded women and that it should be banned when she started writing her 1995 biography on Comstock titled Weeder in the Garden of the Lord: Anthony Comstock's Life and Career. However, after completing her biography and learning more about Comstock, she believed that “free speech is ‘a liberty above price,’ and efforts to enforce purity ‘have historically done far more harm to women than pornographic pictures’” (14). We are now seeing that come to fruition after many decades.

Which is why, after studying Comstock for the past two and a half years, I have come to this conclusion:

Comstock didn’t win. He lost badly. In his own time. The laws that he helped get passed eventually fell out of favor in the American legal system over the decades following his death, and some were even declared unconstitutional. The Hicklin rule was eradicated in 1957 with the ruling in the Roth case, and porn was formally legalized in 1969 with the ruling in Stanley v. Georgia. It was then succeeded by Reno v. ACLU, and then the Brown v. ESM ruling came along. It seemed as if the Comstock era was behind us.

But…it really wasn’t. Political correctness took off in the 1990s and 2000s, and it became amplified in the 2010s with the rise of woke LGBTQ+ activism, radical 3rd wave feminism, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the MeToo movement. The woke activists and feminists then took over the video game industry, and they’re now looking to sink their claws into manga, anime, and eventually Japanese pop culture as a whole. Video games and even anime are no longer taking as many risks as they did even 10 years ago, and sexually attractive characters and politically incorrect storylines are demonized by the woke activists in the media.

Comstock didn’t win.
 

ZOMBIE Comstock won. ZOMBIE Calvinism won.

That’s why this article exists. It’s not just about Comstock, it’s about the disastrous legacy of Calvinism and Legalism, and how they have indirectly (and not so indirectly) caused many of the modern ills of the Western world such as political correctness, radical feminism, gender activism, Socialism, and Communism. 

Comstock is just another byproduct of Calvinism and Legalism, one that turned this country on its head, and not in a good way. Now we’re witnessing the long-term effects of what he’s done, none of which are good.

And yet a flock of fuckheads on the left use his exact same tactics without even realizing it:

(Source for image: https://www.jsanilac.com/dispelling-beauty-lies/) 

Along with the fact that activists on the asterisk right continue to believe that he did it all for a principle he never held - protecting the youth from the dangers of sexuality.

The Founding Fathers would not have considered Comstock, and the Radical Republicans who supported him, to be champions of the rights they articulated, nor would they have supported Comstock's Cultural Revolution of "purity." Not even Hamilton would have been on board with what Comstock was doing.

Things may seem bleak now, but don’t ever give up. This battle is far from over. There is no light without darkness and without evil, the good often fail to find their voice. At least after reading this article, you now know the true origins of the woke, and what needs to be done in order to take back the culture from them.

It’s time to throw Anthony Comstock and his Calvinist ideals into the trash bin of history, where they belong.

And with all that being said...

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19. PBS Frontline. (n.d.). God in America: People & Ideas: The Puritans. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/godinamerica/people/puritans.html
20. Brudnoy, D. (1975, October). Comstock’s Nemesis: Theodore Schroeder. Reason. https://reason.com/1975/10/01/comstocks-nemesis/?itm_source=parsely-api
21. Murphy, M. (2015, September 9). Anita Sarkeesian’s new video takes on male entitlement. Feminist Current. https://www.feministcurrent.com/2015/09/08/anita-sarkeesians-new-video-takes-on-male-entitlement/
22. Comstock, A. (1888). Morals Versus Art. J.S. Ogilvie & Co.
23. Comstock, A., & Bremner, R. (1967). Traps For The Young. Harvard University Press.
24. Kurian, G. T., & Lamport, M. A. (2016). Encyclopedia of Christianity in the United States (Vol. 5). Rowman & Littlefield.
25. Thomas Aquinas on why the law should not punish imperfect men for practising vices which do not harm others (1274). Online Library of Liberty. (n.d.). https://oll.libertyfund.org/quotes/thomas-aquinas-on-why-the-law-should-not-punish-imperfect-men-for-practising-vices-which-do-not-harm-others-1274
26. McMaken, R. (2013, January 1). Catholic Theologians: Prostitution Should Be Legal. Mises Institute. https://mises.org/mises-wire/catholic-theologians-prostitution-should-be-legal-0
27. Stilinovic, M. (2018, April 23). The Day The Books Were Burned. Amnesty International Australia. https://www.amnesty.org.au/books-burned/
28. Li, A. (2019, September 24). A Very Brief History of Banned Books in China. Asia Society. https://asiasociety.org/new-york/very-brief-history-banned-books-china

(*) - the numbers in each paragraph corresponds to one of the sources listed in the bibliography.