The New Morality Police Ought To Chill With Some Fun Sex
I can’t imagine why anyone would want to have sex with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., Rep. Margaret Taylor Greene, R-Ga., Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., or Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
Yet, these seven, self-appointed moralists who are about as sexual as a rock and as hypocritical as Tammy Faye Bakker, are leading a nationwide right wing effort to clean up America, purify the minds of our soiled children and purge public institutions of anything that smacks of sex, including information on abortion, contraception, same sex marriage, transgendered people and the rest.
Add the Oklahoma Metropolitan Library System and its ban on research or even talking about abortion and contraception to a list that is certain to grow as the phony Puritans lead us back to a world of false purity.
Anthony Comstock would be proud of you all.
Thomas has said that same-sex marriage could be outlawed while McConnell has declined to comment on a bill that has cleared the house that would legalize same-sex unions.
Gaetz, winner of the award for legislator with the least class, recently spoke at the right wing, Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Florida, where he got laughs when he pointed out that unattractive women who “look like a thumb” shouldn’t complain about the loss of abortion rights because they’re the “least” likely to get pregnant.
“Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb,” said Gaetz, who is under investigation by federal authorities for sexual trafficking.
Coming in a close second in the least class competition is Greene, who reminds me of the fourth grader who taunted classmates, saying their mothers wore combat boots.
Last week Greene directed her sophisticated tweets at U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, the nation’s first openly transgender government official and a strong advocate of protecting the rights of the LGBTA+ community.
Greene’s tweet referred to Levine by her birth gender as “Dr. Dick Levine” and asked “As Dr. Dick Levine advocates for ‘gender affirming care’ for minors, has he undergone the #WeenieChop himself? Or is he just pushing this on children?”
Greene first boasted about her transphobia in February 2021 when she got into it with Rep. Marie Newman, D-Ill., who is mother to a trans child,and has an office across from Greene. After a vote in which Greene opposed LGBTA+ protections, Newman displayed a transgender flag in the hallway. To which Greene responded by putting a sign on the same wall that read, “There are TWO genders MALE & FEMALE. ‘Trust the science!’”
WeenieChop is right up there with other examples of Greene’s Mensa-like intelligence as letting us all know that fake meat grows in a “peach tree dish,” that “denial is not just a river in Iraq,” “remember what Jesus said during the service on the Mountain: ‘Give only those who work for their daily bread . . . bread,’” and that she believes firmly in the “the sanctuary of human life.”
In speaking at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit of fledgling fascists, Greene also announced that she is proud of being a Christian nationalist and that the movement will solve school shootings and “sexual immorality” in America.
The worst hypocrite award goes to Thompson who has taken the high, religious ground in loudly opposing a bill protecting same sex marriage, a bill that was approved last week by the House despite Thompson’s opposition. Three days later, Thompson attended his gay son’s wedding.
And Cruz has informed us that “Every life is a gift from God, and without life, there is no liberty,” although he apparently was not referring to the life of a 10-year-old rape victim who was barred from getting an abortion. And Hawley, another committed right winger and avowed keeper of the morality flame, just keeps running.
A memo from Oklahoma’s Metropolitan Library System (MLS) warned librarians against using the word “abortion” in speaking with patrons and not to help patrons locate abortion-related information on either library computers or their own devices. Library staff who violate the dystopian order could face dismissal, a $10,000 fine and jail time. The warning was prompted by Oklahoma’s total abortion ban that became effective after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.
The message asks library workers to be wary of people who try to trick staff into giving them information on how to obtain an abortion so they can report them to authorities. Such reports can earn a bounty for a snitch, also part of an abortion law that has been passed in Oklahoma and Texas.
Thomas, Gaetz, Greene, Cruz and the rest of their morality gang could get a few pointers from Anthony Comstock, a self-appointed anti-vice crusader from the late 19th and early 20th century. Comstock’s mission was to impose his sense of morality on what Americans read, saw and even did in their own bedrooms through raiding bookstores, post offices and other locales. His efforts resulted in passage of the Comstock Laws, which outlawed contraception and any literature that contained information on preventing pregnancy.
The Comstock Laws, formerly known as the “Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use,” was passed in 1873 under the administration of President Ulysses Grant. The laws made it a crime to use the U.S. Postal Service to mail obscenity, contraceptives, abortifacients ( a substance that induces abortion), sex toys, personal letters with any sexual content or information, or any information regarding the above items.
Comstock first gained notoriety in New York as the leader of the YMCA’s Committee for the Suppression of Vice, leading to passage of New York’s Obscene Literature Act of 1868, which authorized Comstock to confiscate and destroy books and other materials that he claimed could corrupt the fragile morals of young men.
Comstock became particularly active in the early days of the women’s rights movement and targeted the anarchist Emma Goldman and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, who both denounced Comstock. In 1914, Comstock arranged to have Sanger indicted over the contents of her magazine “The Woman Rebel,” which he called “obscene, lewd and lascivious.” Rather than face trial and a potential 45-year prison term, Sanger fled the country, but returned in 1915 when the government later dropped the charges.
Sanger coined the term “birth control” and published “Women Rebel,” with articles with titles such as “The Prevention of Contraception” and “Are Preventive Means Injurious?”
Serving for 42 years as an appointed special agent for the post office, Comstock claimed credit for 4,000 convictions, 160 tons of destroyed books and other materials and at least 15 suspects driven to suicide.
A July 19, 1915, story in the New York Times reported on Comstock’s address to the Ninth International Purity Congress, in San Francisco. Comstock “recited statistics to show that he had gradually driven out of New York all obscene publications.” At one point, a person in the audience, Leon Malmud of Albany, N.Y., shouted if Comstock “thinks he has acted justly and rightly in having William Sanger of New York arrested for selling a publication published by his wife, Margaret Sanger, when Mr. Comstock sent an agent to William Sanger who secured a copy of the book in question by a subterfuge?”
Another person, William C. Hall, a local medical student, asked Comstock “Do you believe that you do right in stamping as pernicious and corrupting the works of men like Havelock Ellis, Dr. Von Krafft Ebing and Dr. (Karl) Ulrich or are you assuming that to those of pure mind books on the body and sex are gangrened and rotten?” Ellis, Ebing and Ulrigh were early, 20th century sexologists.
In past months, school districts have banned books, communities have burned them and states have outlawed mail-order medication, and criminalizing the act of sharing information about abortion. The modern-day version of the Comstock Laws is thriving.