[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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