Talk politics.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/pill/peopleevents/e_comstock.html

http://www.case.edu/affil/skuyhistcontraception/online-2012/Comstock.html

http://academic.evergreen.edu/k/klalor09/Post%20Office%20Censorship%20home.htm

Anthony Comstock is one of the all-time classic puritans that American politics every once in a while sees rise to the surface out of the chaotic mess that is the American political spectrum. These Elmer Gantrys of the political world invariably cloak rather dirty double-dealing in the most pure, high, and noble rhetoric. While Comstock claimed to oppose contraception from a theoretically moral point of view, he used dirty, underhanded methods to criticize what he deemed as obscenity, which in practice meant that he boosted the power of the government to censor mail and anything else it desired. Comstock's definition of obscenity in practical terms served to deliberately censor any and all references to abortion and contraception.

This is not to say that Anthony Comstock by any means was or is akin to his latter-day successors, who prefer to outlaw all but one or two abortion clinics in a state and threaten the employees in the clinics as being responsible for any and all violence against their persons. No, Comstock relied on both an appeal to the puritanical, priggish morality of his time and the use of the legal system in a legal fashion to target his opponents. It led to instances like Margaret Sanger being tried for an 'obscenity' that amounted to something that was hardly obscene save by the definition of mentioning the mere concept of birth control as obscene, but it was indeed purely and perfectly legal. The law might deliberately censor and ban any and all views that disagreed with the arbitrary standards of a deceptive, conniving individual, but it was still the law.

In this regard I see Comstock as the prototype in a real sense of the modern social conservative. Officially, everything he did was just and right because he did it, and anyone who disagreed was unjust and immorally wrong and going to Hell for having the uppitiness to disagree with him. In practical terms, his behaviors were deliberately underhanded and amounted to the kind of conviction that is most dangerous in a theoretically democratic society. Democracy, to a very great degree, relies on people being willing to accept the prospect that people who disagree with them, however vehemently, will have the freedom to do and to say as they please. Democracy requires compromise. Democracy requires people who are willing to accept that freedom of speech means the sentiments they disagree with the most powerfully should be expressed, and that people have the right in the privacy of their own homes to do as they please with their own bodies.

Attempts to go the Comstock route and to censor materials related to viewpoints people disagree with, to me, are fundamental distortions of both democratic principle and the way freedom of speech should operate. Freedom of speech, to be sure, is no mandate to listen. Instead, I think that one of the healthiest aspects of a functioning democracy is the ability of people who strongly disagree with each other to respect the freedom of those who disagree with them to hold the views that they *do* consider the most morally wrong, and to defend that freedom to speak above others. Voltaire never actually said it, but the sentiment is a good one all the same: "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."