The conservative obsession with purity and control is being achieved by increasingly punitive means
The US supreme court justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas cited the Comstock Act, named after the 19th-century anti-vice campaigner Anthony Comstock, in last week’s case about access to the abortion pill mifepristone. If you don’t know who Anthony Comstock was or what his law did, that might not have alarmed you. But it should have.
The Comstock Law has come up a lot lately, and it’s part of the Republican war on sex, and to put it that way might sound overly dramatic. But there is such a war, and parts of it – against sex education, against access to birth control, against the healthcare provider Planned Parenthood and of course against abortion – have long been out in the open along with a war against the rights of women and on the rights and very existence of queer and trans people.
Comstock was reputed to be driven by religious shame over masturbation to become his era’s most extreme anti-sex crusader. He rose to prominence in the early 1870s, when he convinced Congress to make it a crime to advertise, sell or mail contraceptives or give out contraceptive information, even orally, or to mail anything “immoral” – a term whose vagueness allowed widespread prosecution, including of a feminist newspaper reporting on sexual abuse whose prominent publishers, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, he got sent to prison. Like modern-day rightwingers he was a book-burner, and he boasted that he had driven 15 people to suicide.
Become?
Here’s to pretending they were ever anything but…
Revisionist self delusion is unbecoming.
Reading this article, it feels like the author is just discovering the Republican party for the first time.
This is what the conservatives have been since Nixon.
I mean I get it. I get jealous that others have sex lives while I don’t.
But trying to exert that jealousy on an entire country’s population sounds a little bit extreme
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Comstock Law has come up a lot lately, and it’s part of the Republican war on sex, and to put it that way might sound overly dramatic.
Comstock was reputed to be driven by religious shame over masturbation to become his era’s most extreme anti-sex crusader.
He rose to prominence in the early 1870s, when he convinced Congress to make it a crime to advertise, sell or mail contraceptives or give out contraceptive information, even orally, or to mail anything “immoral” – a term whose vagueness allowed widespread prosecution, including of a feminist newspaper reporting on sexual abuse whose prominent publishers, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, he got sent to prison.
While the backlash to Roe’s June 2022 overturning has been spectacular, with Democratic election victories and blue-state legislation strengthening reproductive rights, that doesn’t spare women in red states from the horrific consequences of the decision.
The far right the Heritage Foundation belongs to is, nevertheless, driving toward this goal by striving to take away birth control and abortion to make sex punitively risky for anyone who might get pregnant.
The right has also made noise about ending no-fault divorce and marriage equality, and introduced hundreds of anti-trans bills this year and last.
The original article contains 840 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
All this “purity” talk, yet they’re perfectly fine with men diddling little kids. Get off of it, you liars. It’s all about control.
Diddling little girls, specifically. They think humanity was at it’s peak during the Bronze Age, when women weren’t considered people, they were a resource like livestock.
Idk I think they were still pretty quiet when the diddling was of little boys, too
Yeah between the abuses of the clergy and the way they treat boys who are molested by female teachers who happen to be attractive they clearly don’t care.
As if that weren’t enough, in May 2023, the Heritage Foundation declared on social media, “Conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills.”
Yikes 😬
God didn’t say “go forth and make yourself plenty”, he said “be ashamed of your genitalia and the urges I have placed deep in your psyche to reproduce, and instead tie reproduction to a legally binding document that enslaves a gender of the species”
The reason they are against birth control is at least partially because the Bible says to go and reproduce a lot. The whole point of contraception is to stop that from happening.
And it ties in with the great replacement thing. They don’t want to be outnumbered by those non-white non Christian second class citizens.
Plenty of black folks are Christian too but whute Republicans wouldn’t want to be outnumbered by them either.
The republicans are a high control coalition party. Some of them don’t mind if black Christians reproduce like crazy so long as they follow the right style of Christianity. Others are happy to have black people to hide behind until they have the power to enact their racism. The thing that unites them is that they all want similar enough of a situation and believe that when they have the power their faction comes out on top. The atheist white nationalist isn’t looking at the black quiverfull as their fellow republican or vice versa, they’re both looking at the moderately racist but keeps it quiet Christian nationalist and betting that those people will side with them. And in the meantime they share immediate goals in preventing women from sleeping around or participating fully in society
Bingo
But but but muh small guberment! Muh keep your guberment outta muh business!
These stupid sheep will vote R and bah bah bah along with whatever their “thought leaders” tell them to do…
I’m getting very frustrated that the party of hate is making me hate so much too… I hate them with every fiber of my being…
But but but muh small guberment! Muh keep your guberment outta muh business!
Its easy to forget that “Small Government Conservatism” neatly tracked the GOP as an outsider party. Democrats controlled the House of Representatives continuously from 1932 to 1994. They also controlled a majority of governor’s mansions and state legislatures for roughly as long. As soon as Gingrich took Congress in '94 and then Bush took the White House in '00, the Republican love of small government fell away like old skin off a snake.
restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex
Looks like it’s time to start training and go pro.
Wow, that is… Yeah, yikes pretty much nails it.
The Fundamentalist Christian hijacking of the Republican party started over 50 years ago, but it wasn’t until Alzheimer’s-ridden Ronald Reagan got into office that it was given the green light by a President.
Nixon was the first symptom everyone could see, Reagan was the metastasizing, but the original infection goes all the way back through George Lincoln Rockwell, the John Birch Society, and the business plot
No it goes all the way back to the Puritans coming over because the Catholics weren’t repressing and persecuting enough for them ("they weren’t hurting the people they needed to be).
Time to break out my favorite Barry Goldwater quotes:
Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.
And:
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!
Or:
Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism. Fellow Republicans, it is the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, private or public, which enforce such conformity and inflict such despotism. It is the cause of Republicanism to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people.
Last one for now:
I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in “A,” “B,” “C” and “D.” Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of “conservatism.”
This Republican Senator was telling it like it was all the way back in the 60’s.
My favorite thing about Goldwater is he was terrifying for his time. The Goldwater rule is because of how fucking nuts he was. In short he ran on a platform of blatant racism. Had the Republican Party followed his path we’d likely be fighting today against a party of white nationalism with a Christian nationalist wing instead of the inverse we fight today.
Fascist movements use conservative “moral” judgement and their disgust at minority sexualities as a tool to control their ideological enemies.
It’s why they hate birth control and abortion so much: they allow women to control their own lives and have a career. The Nazis also had a program to drive women out of the workforce so that men didn’t have to compete with them.
It’s not a coincidence; it’s a plan.
Exactly. Notice how the people crying for women to have “sexual purity” rarely see women as having a place in the world beyond sex
Except for all that kiddy fucking.
Ironically it’s probably those who resist sexuality who are the most sexually deviant
They want women to be brood sows and maids. Think Handmaids Tale but with less minorities and more rape.
but oral contraception is my favorite type!
Become?
owning people still a goal. what civil war?
