[On September 19th, 1985, Congress held hearings over the concept of parental advisory warnings for music. So this week, I’ll commemorate that complex anniversary by highlighting histories of censorship in America, leading up to a weekend post on the very fraught state of these issues in 2025.]
On one
genuinely important application of a controversial law, and a far more
significant underlying problem.
In lieu of
a full first paragraph here, I’m going to ask you to check out a couple prior pieces.
There’s this January
2023 post of mine on 1873 anniversaries, where I say a bit about the
Comstock Act. And there’s this trio of pieces for the
wonderful Nursing Clio blog that trace different histories and contemporary contexts
for the Act. Those should give a bit of helpful framing for this controversial and
enduring 1873 law (as does that 19th News article), and then
come on back for a couple further thoughts.
Welcome
back! One of the key goals of the Comstock Act was to define
for the first time, at least in terms of legal debates in the United
States, concepts like “obscenity” and “pornography.” I’ll get to the significant
and evolving problems with that goal in a moment, but it’s important to note
that one consistent and entirely laudatory application
of these elements of the Act over the last half-century has been to
prosecute child pornographers. See for example this Catholic
News Agency interview with retired FBI agent Roger Young, who specialized
in such cases and who argues that “when I first began working child pornography
cases early in 1977, there were no child porn laws. We used obscenity laws to
prosecute child porn.” As recently as 2021, Thomas
Alan Arthur was, through the application of the Comstock Act, successfully
prosecuted and sentenced to 40 years in prison for running a website featuring
child pornography (a 21st century application of the law’s emphasis
on sending obscene materials through
the mail).
Child pornography
is, I hope we can all agree, obscene and worth stopping by any legal means possible.
But the problem with the Comstock Act is that its definition of obscenity is purposefully
and strikingly vague, and as a result it can, has been, and is continuing
to be applied far more broadly and troublingly. That has most consistently been
the case when it comes to reproductive rights—Comstock
was famously draconian when it came to sex and sexuality, and so the law and
its terms were both initially designed to challenge things like birth
control and abortion
and have been used as such frequently (applications which are seeing a resurgence
in 2025). But, as we’ll see again tomorrow with the use of “sedition” as a legal
concept in the early 20th century, censorship and those who seek to
practice it depend on precisely this kind of vague, broad language. If we want
to ban child pornography, as we should and must, then the relevant laws should
state that goal specifically and clearly; if we seek to ban all that’s “obscene,”
we are inevitably going to find ourselves at the mercy of how our leaders (and,
often, our most extremist leaders at that) define that concept.
Next
censored history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Censorship histories or current events you’d highlight?
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