With the stroke of his pen, President Joe Biden might take a stand in opposition to authoritarian restrictions on free speech by issuing a posthumous pardon to D.M. Bennett, the freethought writer convicted of violating the Comstock Act in 1879.
Over the previous 12 months, judges have revived the long-dead Comstock Act to justify restrictions on speech and abortion medication. Supreme Court docket Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas even approvingly cited the moribund legislation in latest arguments.
For these causes, the Basis for Particular person Rights and Expression (FIRE) has submitted a petition to the president searching for Bennett’s pardon each to deal with the private injustice ensuing from this 145-year-old conviction and in addition to place the administration on report in opposing the resurgence of this legislation that threatens the rights of all Individuals.
Comstock’s Campaign In opposition to Immorality
D.M. Bennett’s story highlights the significance of First Modification protections which have rendered the Comstock Act out of date. Bennett was the founder and writer of The Truth Seeker, a freethought journal nonetheless in circulation immediately. He was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to a 12 months of arduous labor for distributing Cupid’s Yokes, a pamphlet attacking the establishment of marriage, written by free love advocate Ezra Heywood.
Though the cost was obscenity, Bennett was focused for opposing the Comstock Act—an 1873 legislation prohibiting the mailing of any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” materials, something “designed or supposed for the prevention of conception or procuring of an abortion,” or something supposed for “any indecent or immoral use.” Anthony Comstock, the legislation’s namesake and an anti-smut crusader, lobbied for and personally enforced the legislation as a particular agent of the U.S. Postal Service. Underneath the legislation’s broad mandate, every part that Comstock thought-about immoral was by definition obscene and, subsequently, unlawful.
Comstock’s idea of immorality included blasphemy, sensational novels and information tales, artwork, and even scientific and medical texts. Close to the top of his four-decade profession as an anti-vice crusader, Comstock claimed he convicted sufficient folks to just about “fill a passenger practice of sixty-one coaches,” and in addition destroyed 160 tons of literature and 4 million footage. Most shameful of all, he boasted of inflicting not less than fifteen suicides.
Bennett, whom Comstock described as a “ringleader,” turned a particular goal as a result of he actively sought to repeal the Comstock Act and picked up signatures for a repeal petition in The Reality Seeker. He additionally supplied to distribute Cupid’s Yokes after Comstock prosecuted Heywood. Regardless of not agreeing with Heywood’s free love advocacy, Bennett was outraged that anybody in America might be prosecuted for expressing their views.
Comstock prosecuted Heywood 3 times for writing and distributing Cupid’s Yokes. After an 1878 conviction, President Rutherford B. Hayes pardoned Heywood, writing in his diary that “it’s no crime by the legal guidelines of the USA to advocate the abolition of marriage” and he didn’t take into account Cupid’s Yokes to be obscene. Nevertheless, Hayes would later deny a pardon to Bennett, who merely distributed the pamphlet, after Comstock personally intervened to dam the clemency request. At age 60, Bennett was confined to Albany jail, and the compelled labor whereas there reduce brief his life.
Abuses like Bennett’s conviction spurred a sea change within the legislation, ultimately resulting in stronger First Modification protections. In 1957, the Supreme Court docket in Roth v. United States declared that “intercourse and obscenity will not be synonymous” and set a excessive bar for presidency censorship, nullifying a lot of the Comstock Act. It has been a lifeless letter because the mid-twentieth century.
Till now.
The Urgency of Correcting Historic Injustices
Current decisions threaten to revive the Comstock Act as a car for proscribing speech and entry to contraceptives and pharmaceutical abortions. Now’s the time to acknowledge and treatment previous abuses whereas reaffirming our dedication to the ideas of free expression.
The president is uniquely positioned to take action by way of the facility to pardon. Posthumous presidential pardons are uncommon however have been granted to right previous injustices and sign future values. It’s notably becoming for President Biden to make use of the pardon energy to focus on the significance of First Modification rights which have been abridged underneath an unjust legislation.
President Thomas Jefferson used government clemency to undo the harm brought on by the Sedition Act of 1798—the legislation that criminalized expressing any “false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings in opposition to the federal government,” and which was used aggressively to punish political opponents of the Adams Administration. And though the act expired and was by no means examined in court docket, the consensus of historical past is that it was essentially at odds with the First Modification. Jefferson’s pardons bolstered this judgment. He would later write that he thought-about the Sedition Act “a nullity, as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden picture.”
And so it’s with the Comstock Act.
The necessity for a posthumous pardon for Bennett is much more compelling due to the methods the Comstock Act is getting used immediately to threaten particular person rights. Bennett was convicted 145 years in the past however President Biden ought to pardon him now; there may be by no means a incorrect time to do the appropriate factor.
