Susan Campbell (opinion): The man who was CT’s vice czar

He was not educated, and he struck people as prudish to the point of perversion. The New York Times made wicked fun of him. Civil liberties organizations fought him tooth and nail. George Bernard Shaw called him a joke. He called Shaw an “Irish smut dealer.”

Yet for decades, New Canaan’s own Anthony Comstock held incredible sway over what was considered obscene and pornographic. He was admired. He was hated. He was feared.

And though it is wrong to put words in the mouths of the dead, I will hazard a guess that Comstock would be pleased at the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which for nearly a half century provided federal constitutional protection of abortion rights. And though I do not own a crystal ball, I will also hazard a guess that the Court’s recent decision will one day — soon, I hope — be ridiculed by history at least as much as is Comstock.

That’s happening already. The United Nations has already issued a statement decrying the “shocking and dangerous” decision “that will jeopardize women’s health and lives.” And while right-wingers are exulting in this latest victory, the Republican party, by devolving into the Forced Birth Party, has alienated a political active, socially aware generation of young voters.

Comstock, a failed grocer, was a Victorian’s Victorian. He served in the Civil War, but more than the carnage he saw, Comstock was bothered by the coarse language of his fellow soldiers who resisted his attempts to take them to church on Sunday. With help from the influential YMCA, Comstock founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (a word we don’t hear often enough these days), and in 1873, he was able to successfully lobby for passage of An Act for the Suppression of Trade In, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, known better as the Comstock Law, which criminalized the publication, possession, or distribution of “lewd” or “indecent” items.

Lewd or indecent was broadly interpreted to include a variety of Gilded Age pornography — what today might pass for an evening of family television — as well as information about contraceptives and abortion.

After Congress passed Comstock’s law, they named him a special agent of the postal service, by which he could doggedly pursue people — many of them women — who dared to so much as share medically accurate information about the workings of the human reproductive system.

In this, Comstock was relentless.

As New York writer Amy Sohn wrote in her award-winning 2021 book, “The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age,” Comstock counted the pain he caused among abortionists as a victory, and kept track of how many people had committed suicide to escape his pursuits. (Comstock was prone to exaggeration, so we will most likely never know how many people died because of his efforts.) His special targets were abortionists, though he included anyone who shared information about birth control and critiques of traditional marriage in his maniacal desire to clean the world of anything he deemed naughty.

Sohn wrote, “The Comstock era revealed the danger that ensues when a polemical, well-funded, highly connected, determined man gains access to political power and will stop at nothing to keep it.”

Indeed. There’s a lot about Comstock’s story that will sound familiar. His lack of formal education was surpassed by his zeal, and he possessed a unique ability to partner with powerful people. As Sohn wrote recently in the Washington Post, Comstock would have been nothing without the influential cadre of blue-blooded Christian white men anxious to fund his efforts.

Comstock’s legacy is primarily how he linked contraceptives with pornography (only naughty people have sex. We haven’t quite broken that link. In his concurring opinion last month, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the Supreme Court should also reconsider past rulings on access to contraceptives, as well as same-sex marriage. (Thomas, a Black man, is married to insurrection-adjacent Virginia Thomas, a white woman. He should hope his group doesn’t also start reconsidering their decisions on interracial marriages.)

Abortion certainly still carries a stigma, all while we are being led by people who couldn’t describe the gestation process if their lives depended on it. That, too, is nothing new.

“One of the things that upsets me the most is Anthony Comstock was very confused about the difference between contraception — preventing a pregnancy — and trying to end a pregnancy,” Sohn said. “He didn’t understand the difference.”

In the end, Comstock lived long enough to see a growing birth control movement that would supplant his efforts. He also saw himself made vicious sport of. In 1926, more than a decade after Comstock’s death, H.L. Mencken wrote, “The net result of Comstockery is complete and ignominious failure. All its gaudy raids and alarms have simply gone for naught. Comstock, of course, was an imbecile; his sayings and doings were of such sort that they inevitably excited the public mirth.”

I do not know if the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will ever invoke mirth. The stakes are too high, but I count on history treating the conservative six members of that august body with the disdain they have earned.

Susan Campbell is author of “Frog Hollow: Stories From an American Neighborhood,” “Tempest Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker,” and “Dating Jesus: Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl.” Find more at susancampbell.substack.com .