I first became obsessed with the works of James Joyce as a high school freshman. I read everything I could by and about him. This is how I first became aware of the Comstock Act, the 1873 “anti-vice” law used to ban Joyce’s revolutionary novel Ulysses in the U.S. in 1921.
Readers then and now have embraced the novel’s naturalistic portrayal of desire and sexuality, but the novel was considered “pornographic” and “obscene” at the time. It wasn’t published in the U.S. until 1934, after a federal judge overturned the ban in a landmark case, United States v. One Book Called Ulysses.
The overly expansive Comstock Act outlawed “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” written material or “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion” sent through the mail or transported across state lines. As such, the law conflated written material and sexuality it deemed unacceptable for the U.S. public. The namesake of the law, Anthony Comstock, called “obscene” books “the feeder of brothels.”
While the law seems like a relic from the past, it was never repealed, and conservatives behind book bans now want to use the Comstock law to come after our personal right to choose.
These dual threats to our intellectual and physical freedoms came to my mind this month while reading Penguin Books’ amicus brief in support of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s ongoing 2024 lawsuit against a Georgia school district on behalf of Katie Rinderle and others. Rinderle is the former public school teacher who was fired in 2023 for reading an inclusive children’s book to her fifth graders.
Note this: In 2023-2024, 10,000 book titles were banned, according to PEN America, three times more than the previous school year. Books that have LGBTQ+ themes, protagonists or secondary characters (over 40%) and books with sexual content (over 20%) together comprise the majority of banned books. (Ulysses is on the American Library Association’s list of “Most Frequently Banned and Challenged Classics.”)
The year 2023 was also when conservatives called for a ban on mail delivery of the medical abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol, citing the Comstock Act. Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization striking down Roe v. Wade, and state laws also criminalizing caregivers, at-home medical abortion became the most common method in the U.S.
Last year, a federal district court judge blocked the sale by mail of mifepristone in a case brought by anti-abortion physicians, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously to keep the drug’s legal status unchanged. However, Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas expressed support for a ban on abortion-inducing drugs, and Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion in the Dobbs decision that the court “should reconsider its past rulings codifying rights to contraception access, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage.”
So long as political power remains majority conservative, conservatives will not stop until all sexual behavior and reading materials conform to their notion of suitable morality. But as history shows, where there is a will to fight righteously for personal freedom, there will always be a way.
Jenice Fountain, executive director of reproductive justice nonprofit and SPLC partner Yellowhammer Fund, announced that in the four days after the Nov. 5 election, the nonprofit received over 960 new emergency requests for abortion drugs and contraception compared to the usual 40 that it typically receives each month. Since January, Yellowhammer and partner organizations have distributed over 17,000 doses of emergency contraception in the Deep South.
Progressive activists and publishers like Fountain, Rinderle and Penguin Books give us hope.
In the face of organized opposition, conscientious objectors will stand tall to defend our individual rights across the four corners of this nation — in courage, strength and in vision — for what is universally and individually right for ourselves.
Image at top: Illustration by the SPLC.
This post was originally published on here
