Attack of the Theocrats!: How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It by Sean Faircloth Page B

a person. In that era they held that these so-called persons had “rights.” These so-called corporate rights included paying slave wages to little children to work in mines. Children lost their fingers in the cotton mills. That was freedom for corporate America in the late 1800s.
    Think of it. No laws, federal or state, when it came to protecting children in the workplace. Lots of “freedom,” if you want to call it that, regarding how to exploit poor children in a mine.
    Yet in the same era, the government enacted a federal statute—known as the Comstock Act—that made it illegal to deliver or transport “obscene, lewd, or lascivious material.” References to birth control met the obscenity definition of this statute. The man who championed the law to Congress, crusader Anthony Comstock, was one of the most powerful people of whom most Americans have never heard. Comstock just so happened to become the enforcer of the very law he had successfully spearheaded (convenient, no?).
    Defining obscenity is ridiculously arbitrary business, so what types of material, aside from information on birth control, did Comstock deem“obscene”? Well, Comstock called George Bernard Shaw—the only person to win both an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize for Literature—“an Irish smut peddler.” Shaw had written a play about a smart woman who ran a brothel. An early supporter of women’s rights, Shaw was a nonreligious human-rights activist who said, “All great truths begin as blasphemies.”
    Comstock made sure Walt Whitman was fired from his government job because Whitman wrote
Leaves of Grass
, which called on the reader to “re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” Comstock also got Victoria Woodhull, the first-ever female candidate for U.S. president, imprisoned. Candidate Woodhull advocated free love, women’s rights, lenient divorce, and birth control. You can understand why Comstock threw her in the slammer.
    It is written that Anthony Comstock destroyed 15 tons of books, 284,000 pounds of plates that would have printed books he did not like, and nearly 4,000,000 pictures. Comstock boasted that he was responsible for 4,000 arrests and 15 suicides. One woman, an advocate for women’s rights and birth control, wrote specifically in her suicide note that it was continual harassment by Comstock that sent her over the edge.
    Comstock also had Emma Goldman, a very early advocate of gay rights and a prominent voice for free love, jailed twice for distribution of birth control information. Once Goldman stayed in jail for two weeks rather than pay a fine that she actually could afford to pay. She stayed so that she might meet more of the people in prison and learn from their experiences. Goldman was a bit radical for my blood, but I love her. She called Comstock the leader of the “moral eunuchs” and famously said, “If there won’t be dancing at the revolution, I’m not coming.”
    Real Sexual Morality: The Principle of Consent and the Nature of Sex
    I suggest that we should indeed have a strong sense of sexual morality, but not the sexual morality of what Emma Goldman called the “moral eunuchs.” As a former assistant attorney general who in my brief time over-saw scores of child-protection cases, and as a ten-year legislator who chaired a sex-crime commission, I suggest that sexual morality can be captured in two words: consenting adults. The word “consent” excludes an inappropriate power imbalance––or it is not true consent. The word “adults,” meanwhile, excludes priests having sex with boys and preachers having sex with teenage girls. Perhaps most importantly, this principle puts men and women on equal footing, unlike the Victorian and Bronze Age morality of men like Comstock.
    Thankfully, bold voices, like those of Goldman, eventually started to tear away at biblical “morality” and