The Republican party has become a full-fledged anti-sex movement | Rebecca Solnit
www.theguardian.com
The conservative obsession with purity and control is being achieved by increasingly punitive means

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.

  • 800XL@lemmy.world
    29·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • cmbabul@lemmy.world
      201·
      9 months ago

      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

      • Baron Von J@lemmy.world
        111·
        9 months ago

        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).

        • vaultdweller013
          1·
          9 months ago

          The Puritans were also quite egalitarian which tended to piss people off as well. The Puritans leaving Europe was as much them being too zealous as much as it was them being quite radical in things like egalitarianism. Reminder that folks like John Brown were of Puritan descent, also they mellowed out over a couple generations.

    • DigitalTraveler42@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      9 months ago

      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.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
        2·
        9 months ago

        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.