Comstockery Returns to America

While the calendar says it’s 2025 and all eyes are on President Donald Trump’s avalanche of executive orders, in Mississippi last week Democratic Mississippi state senator Bradford Blackmon  introduced legislation with the catchy title Contraception Begins at Erection Act.

The bill would make it “unlawful for men to masturbate ‘without the intent to fertilize an embryo.’” No kidding. This was reported in The Hill. First term senator Blackmon’s bill calls for stiff penalties for masturbation. “The first penalty would be $1,000, the second one would be $5,000, and a fine of $10,000 would be imposed for third or subsequent offenses.”

I’m sure you’re thinking this bill has no shot. But, it is Mississippi, and he may get bipartisan support. The deep thinking Democratic senator said,  “I am trying to figure out when it is OK for the government to dictate what you do in the privacy of your own home. Apparently, it is when the laws regulate men.”

“This bill highlights that fact and brings the man’s role into the conversation,” Blackmon added. “People can get up in arms and call it absurd but I can’t say that bothers me.” 

Ninety-nine years ago, on April 5, 1926, H.L. Mencken was arrested on Boston Common for selling a magazine that had been banned by the New England Watch and Ward Society, the city’s self-appointed moral censors. Mencken was the editor of American Mercury, which ran a short story by Herbert Asbury  entitled “Hatrack” deemed by the Watch and Ward Society as obscene. 

“Hatrack” is purportedly a true account of a prostitute from Asbury’s “hometown in Missouri who regularly sought forgiveness at the local Methodist church. The congregation shunned her and, unsaved, she continued her life of sin, meeting her Catholic customers in the Protestant cemetery and her Protestant customers in the Catholic graveyard.”

Anyone reading Asbury’s story today will laugh at the idea that it could have ever been considered obscene. Mencken traveled to Boston to sell a copy of his magazine and get himself arrested just to lampoon the self-righteous enforcers of morality in Boston. He famously defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.” A day later a judge released Mencken and acquitted him of all charges. Mencken then sued the Watch and Ward society for restraint of trade. 

The Solicitor of the U.S. Post Office then declared that, despite the judge’s ruling, the issue of the American Mercury [containing “Hatrack”] was obscene and mailing the magazine was a federal offense. Mencken, in turn  sued the U.S. Post Office. The case was dismissed a month later on a technicality since the magazine had already been mailed and delivered. “Mencken was disappointed; he had hoped his suit would become a landmark free-speech case.”

Pietism has returned to the U.S. with a channeling of Anthony Comstock.  Anthony who? “He was, more than all others before or after his time, the overlord of vice chasers. With religious fervor, he crusaded mightily against any and all forms of what he saw as moral depravity, especially in matters concerning sex. In the process, Comstock did two things: He launched a "culture war" over impurity in the minds and deeds of Americans, and he changed the face of American law by stewarding a sweeping obscenity bill that he enforced personally. His war thrived in his lifetime and continued on long after his death.”

Mencken dubbed him "the Copernicus of a quite new art and science," and one "who first capitalized moral endeavor like baseball or the soap business, and made himself the first of its kept professors."

“Comstock considered the danger of ‘evil reading’ to be worse than yellow fever or smallpox, which is to say, Comstock considered sex to be worse than deadly diseases. Why? Because he saw sex (and the lure of masturbation—and therefore eternal damnation) in everything,” wrote Robert Corn-Revere for Reason.com. 

Margaret Sanger wrote "[t]here is nothing which causes so much laughter or calls forth so many joking comments by people in Europe as Comstockery in America."

Comstockery has returned to America and it is no laughing matter.