 Hello, everyone. Welcome or so excited to be here with y'all and on this spooky Halloween day. Welcome y'all to our event on the afterlife of Anthony Comstock. My name is Kendra Albert. I'm the director of the initiative for representative First Amendment and I'm just going to get us through a little bit of housekeeping before we get to the fun stuff. There's a couple logistics as you probably already have been notified. This event is being recorded and it will be posted later and in fact we'll send out a link to all of y'all so you can share it with all of your friends, enemies, you know, loved ones, less loved ones, etc. You can enable closed captions for yourself at any time. And thank you so much to Gloshanda and Trisha, our ASL interpreters for today. If you have questions for our panelists and we hope that you will, you can use the Q&A box. And if you encounter any technical issues or have problems, you can please send us an email and I'll drop the email in the chat in a second. Before I sort of, now that those housekeeping items are out of the way, I want to just take a second to thank our sponsor, the Ford Foundation and the staff of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society for their support. They were really grateful for all of the work and effort that folks have put in in terms of making sure that we're able to do this event. So what we're going to do today are fun activities for the next couple of minutes is to do some greetings from me and Melissa Garrett Grant, the co-organizers of comms.com. Then for about 35 minutes we'll hear from our panelists, Jules Gil Peterson, Whitney Straub and Gillian Frank. Then we'll have time for Q&A with all of y'all. And then after that, we're going to take a few minutes and announce sort of what is comms.com, what's the thing that you're all here to see. But before we do any of that, I want to talk a little bit about who this man is. So those of you who are unfamiliar, this is Anthony Comstock, the person who's after life, we're here to celebrate or bury. And you might be wondering why we're sort of starting in 1873 for a conversation about abortion that's going on now. So that's because more than 150 years ago, Anthony Comstock, who was a former dry good salesman of no conspicuous talents and boundless energy to quote journalism scholar Craig LeMay, took up an obsessive campaign to stamp out prostitution, pornography and contraception. He wasn't content to merely raid New York publishers or decry those drinking and pubs. That was just a little too local for him. In 1873, he went to Washington, and Anthony Comstock succeeded in convincing Congress to pass a law to ban the mailing of lewd lascivious indecent and obscene or obscene materials. The power to enforce this law was in the hands of the postmaster general, a position he was appointed to and occupied for the rest of his life, ruthlessly enforcing the law he had written, all in the name of suppressing what he called vice. Comstock's work and his law, frankly, are mostly remembered in terms of an attack on indecent literature, or to put it maybe in more modern terms, pornography. But what Comstock considered obscene was much broader. In fact, the Comstock acts original text applies its provisions to the physical objects associated with abortion and contraception condoms, for example, as well as speech explaining how to obtain them or how to use them. The abortion provisions of the Comstock act have in fact remained on the books they're still part of the law, even as the ones restricting contraception were removed. In fact, the coverage of the Comstock act was expanded in 1996 explicitly applying it to internet services. Even that dangerous expansion was sort of met historically with something of a judicial shrug. The abortion was protected, at least in a legal sense under row, and many of the Comstock acts each restrictions have been limited over the years by multiple Supreme Court cases, such as the obscenity cases Roth and Miller versus California, and the commercial age case bulgar versus young drug products cow. The breadth of the X language, which is very broad, has been historically constrained by judges who interpreted it narrowly, often reading the Comstock act in light of the changing times. But now in the aftermath of the Dobs decision and the appointment of a number of partisan conservatives across the federal judiciary. The comments look a little bit different. The Comstock act no longer looks like a dead letter law, you know something that while it's still on the books is not used or really thought about very much, but rather it looks like a series of taking time bombs. In just the last two years, the Comstock act has been cited as a rationale for restricting access to abortion by district court judges, and a federal Court of Appeals judge in Texas. In the hands of judges like these who claim an allegiance to following the text of the law, especially when it suits their politics. The this law can be deployed against any number of things that its author also would have thought of as wickedness. That means that you know the Comstock act is not an academic topic or merely a historical one. The legal and legal actors who built the strategy for Dobs are well aware of how it might be used to their advantage. Hi everyone, I'm going to take it from here for a minute. So Kendra has laid us out through this 150 years of Comstock, which takes us to where we are now. And hopefully you're thinking, what should we do about this. I don't feel like this anymore. The first thing that we want to say is, we, in sort of figuring out how to respond to Comstock and his revival. It would make sense to avoid repeating the assumptions and the errors of the past, all of which have only helped obscure the lasting power of Comstock few things that we'd like to do differently. We no longer want to assume that rights once pronounced fundamental are guaranteed to us forever. We can no longer make the mistake of isolating these issues from one another, something that's long been pointed out by many who work in movements for reproductive justice. It simply doesn't represent our whole lives. If we go on separating abortion from so many other forms of bodily autonomy from the fight to end for sterilization to the criminalization of sex work. So we propose that when you go back to Comstock, as it seems opponents of bodily autonomy are eager to do. This also offers us an opportunity to approach bodily autonomy with a different set of questions, and more importantly a broader set of commitments to one another. For our purposes, this is where we're starting from today. We know that the criminalization of abortion is not novel or exceptional, and it's intimately connected to other forms of criminalizing bodily autonomy. We assume that the legal system has just one venue of many for which to ensure abortion access. We know that those engaged in local and regional based reproductive justice movement work have both the knowledge and the solutions to end the criminalization bodily autonomy. We know that true justice and liberation require collaborative imagining about how to build power and strengthen communities outside the bounds of the criminal legal system. So that's a bit about the afterlife of Anthony Comstock. So far, we're going to get much more into it shortly. And it's where we hope, because this is the first time that Kendra and myself have been able to share all of this thinking with you. We might continue to go in the spirit and we're very honored that you joined us and you're some of the first people to get to go on this journey with us of hopefully ending the afterlife of Anthony Comstock. Without any further ado, I'd love to welcome our distinguished panel. Julie Jules Gil Peterson, Whitney Straub, and Gillian Frank. And you can learn more about them on our event page here. So I want to just dive into it and get a chance to hear from each of our panelists and then we'll transition into a discussion and after that we're going to have an open q amp a so just as a reminder if you have any questions that come up over the course of this you can drop in the q amp a box and we'll come back to them towards the end. Jules, if you don't mind kicking us off. I like to ask you about Comstock as sort of this. He thinks of himself as like the protector of children of children's innocence and I think his heirs today are also operating in that mode. But of course you know his efforts were never just confined to children and controlling the lives of children. So talk to us a little bit about what role the child plays in Comstockery, and just generally in American conversations about bodily autonomy, what work is the child doing. Thank you. Hi everybody, since Jules speaking I just also want to say, thank you all for for being here. I'm really thrilled to be a part of this conversation. Also, I guess no one took the Halloween invitation to dress up as Comstock I mean I obviously didn't but no one else did either so you know maybe a missed opportunity. So, yeah, you know, part of why I think it's so helpful to return back to the era in which this law came about and the larger context in which it rose is that it returns us to matters of the Victorian era. The reason that might have feel sort of counterintuitive is that the loss, particularly of reproductive rights with the with the dogs decision in 2022 was as our many civil rights issues often framed with reference sort of to the 1960s. As a moment or the 70s when those rights were codified. And, and often we hear that right wing political movements in this country are trying to return the United States to the 1950s. And you know, to whatever extent that's true, I often think that no it's, it's really about the Victorian era, and it's not even so much a return. It has as a continuous that we still live in many ways, not just under the shadow of laws passed during the Victorian era, but particularly and this gets to the question of the child. We live, you know, under the context of a modern state, an administrative state, a police state that was constructed during the Victorian era into the progressive era in the early 20th century and it's really that time period to me as a historian of sexuality that is such a pivotal role in understanding the sort of basic building blocks or infrastructure that permit all of the sorts of, you know, really aggressive attacks on on people's bodily autonomy that we are experiencing today. So, but, you know, we go back to that to that era to this post reconstruction Victorian state where seeing the rise of a particular form of comstockery a kind of, you know, moral rhetoric around the need to protect certain vulnerable people through aggressive state intervention into free speech into bodily autonomy into the labor market into the postal system into so many different aspects of every day and public and private life. We get to this sort of place where I would say yeah the child the figure of the child, which in its modern form actually is also a product of the Victorian era really travels with the figure of the imperiled white woman. So this would be the sort of twin figures for comstock these you know in an endangered vulnerable child and endangered vulnerable white women, both which are sort of fictive people, not necessarily real people sort of an imaginary belonging to this time period that has incredible effects on both real children and on women, but part of how the child in particular I think begins to function, conceptually and politically in this time period that's really helpful for us to pay attention to is the child sort of figures vulnerable as justifying legal social and political dependency, which is to say, if someone is vulnerable and innocent, you know construed as incapable of taking care of themselves or you know vulnerable to be corrupted by obscenity or by sex. And then it sort of authorizes the state often in that time period through the literal, you know, sort of manifestation of white men's power to intervene and deprive those people of, of their bodily autonomy so this is a time period where for instance children, as they're certain types of, you know, rights under the law are also seen their overall, you know legal and economic standing shrink in a lot of ways compared to what it had been prior in some cases, and we're also then again seen this kind of idea of vulnerable white women as facilitating, you know, state power, and particularly male power to regulate and control other people's bodily autonomy, sexuality, speech, freedom of assembly and so on. And so I think really that like the figure of the child deployed in a moral panic or the figure of the vulnerable white woman deployed in a moral panic. And so moral corruption or sexuality really kind of has this broader function in being presented as a political and moral above all, as facilitating the domination of a variety of groups that are politically unpopular so it has effects on real women right but it's also a sort of tool that can be used right to, to associate political enemies or unpopular political movements, or you know religious minorities or all sorts of people with corruption and obscenity, in order to facilitate them being targeted by the and policed more aggressively by the state so I really think it is this Victorian into progressive era moment that sets up this style of statecraft, as much as it's legal kind of infrastructure and armature, and that kind of, you know, infrastructure as you were talking about Kendra just hasn't ever gone away it has been you know altered over time but it never was dismantled per se it is almost the cornerstone in some ways of contemporary or modern US statecraft so we're really kind of getting to the heart of how the state police is people, you know, through through their bodies but also by deploying these particular figures like the imperiled child or the vulnerable white woman to, you know, basically justify forms of political domination. Thank you so much for that. Yeah, I think, going back to this moment in time like we start to see the beginnings of that system of social control, whether that's public or private parts of our lives. We're not being claimed by the state as something they have a vested interest in, but not something that's political because of course this is just the common sense protection of innocent children and also the innocent white woman I'm glad you brought that in as well it's super critical to this, we're going to turn now. So moving through history a little bit now we're coming sort of into the 20th century. We're going to turn to with with it is often assumed that all these anti obscenity laws Comstock and others that this is the regime of the Victorian era or of the past or something we've even left and like, maybe the pre 60s. The 20th century that this is like part of how we actually get to the present is to, you know, abandon or be better than or more sophisticated than this anti obscenity Victorian sort of regime. But as Kendra and also Jules have pointed out, there are ticking time bombs still within our legal system and other structures of social control that allow Comstock's regime to still be live and to pose dangers. And I'm wondering if you can talk us through sort of how those ticking time bomb some of what those ticking times bombs are, and how they are still with us today, maybe particularly as it comes to issues of queer expression, which even though Comstock may have not put it in those terms is obviously part of the group that he's talking about. Yeah, absolutely. Just to preface my comments it's, it's such an honor to be here and I tried to get in the festive spirit although my head is blocking. I am actually haunted by Anthony Comstock whose traps for the young lurks behind my head but unfortunately I blocked my camera pretty poorly here so that's my Halloween spirit. And one other thing I do feel very obligated to say because I think a lot of people tuned in out of interest in censorship if people are concerned about censorship to my mind it's just worth saying out loud that I think the most urgent censorship crisis facing us today is the censorship of Palestinian voices and critics of Israel who are literally being state suppressed by the state at various points and I really hope that anybody here who is concerned about Comstock's legacy and censorship will be held at the very grassroots local level, maybe writing letters to your school board which I think needs to hear from us. But to turn my attention to Anthony Comstock. Yeah, I guess I you know in five minutes I've got about two things I'll try to say one of which is you know picking up on like Kendra and Jules and both alluded to the continuing relevance of Comstock when I read the second book I wrote as a scholar was it's called obscenity rules and it's a history of Roth versus United States the 1957 Supreme Court case that essentially codified the Comstock law into judicial doctrine it's still binding today. And when I was doing my research. If you read Roth v us William Brennan who's the lead author. He says, in light of this history. It is apparent that the unconditional phrasing of the First Amendment was not intended to protect every utterance and I really. I look umbridge at that and when I was reading it I mean at that point I already had a PhD in US history I'd already written a book on censorship battles. You know I had no excuse to be quite so naive but it was still a little. A little shocking to have to confront such a direct refutation of what seems to be pretty categorical language in the First Amendment but over time you know immersing myself in the sources and the case law precedent. And so we confess he was right you know it's not a comfortable truth for those of us who support free speech, but Brennan was absolutely correct that there is no American legal or political tradition of unfettered free speech you know go back to the 1790s and the Alien and Sedition Act go through the suppression of abolitionist voices in the 19th century. Etc etc etc the Red Scare in 1919. You know that is the American political and legal tradition is is censorship. And when you put it in those terms, you know it's worth thinking just about the continuing relevance of Roth because we've never really come close to getting rid of the Comstock Act the Roth case was decided 63. In 1973 when they re heard some of the basic arguments in the Miller versus California case that turned into a five four split. And that's as close as we've ever come right right now if the Comstock Act went to the Supreme Court on its fundamental premises I mean I think it would be a 90 sweep in favor of it I don't think there's one sitting justice who would vote to overturn it and I don't think there's, you know, more than a random handful of politicians at the national level, who would overturn it so we're stuck with the Comstock, at least for the foreseeable political future I think, and going to Melissa's question about ideology and the kind of current threats, you know deeply baked into the Comstock Act, I think and its judicial interpretations I mean is a real targeting of queer and otherwise deviant sexualities. You see moms for liberty, going after gender queer for instance, you know that's built on a long legacy that runs back through Jerry Falwell in the 80s and Eda Bryant in the 70s citizens for decent literature in the 60s, and all the way back to Comstock. And for the sake of time sorry I obviously five minutes is tough to compress oneself to judge us very very briefly to end I mean I think the central formal mechanism of obscenity law as it's been administered for the past century or sort of prurient interests that that's the legal lever that the Supreme Court set up in 1957, which is still binding and basically the determinant of quality, and that's never been a definable term right I mean Brennan defined it in a footnote with a series of synonyms itching uneasy with desire morbid lascivious I mean these are all just loaded ideological terms which structurally set this up to target queer expression in particular and. That's probably just a ball thrown the air that I think we can pick up in the discussion so I'll turn things over to to kill Frank but um yeah thanks for having me and I look forward to continuing the conversation. Thank you so much, and I just want to let folks know Kendra dropped a link in with some more context around what remarks on the suppression of speech around Palestine and Gaza and you can watch an event that for two weeks ago. I'm getting more into that. I think we're going to keep moving forward in time as we come to you go. You know, our modern sexual regime is clearly carved out against this whole past of Comstock laws, even if we don't think about them as often as we ought to they are there lurking ghost like and not so ghost like bringing us up to abortion, which I'm glad we're sort of like inverting this and coming back to abortion with all that laid out. Can you talk to us a bit about how efforts to restrict information access to sexual and reproductive health care played out in this context in the past and maybe what that can tell us about the future we are entering. Thank you so much Melissa for having me at this amazing gathering and thank you also Kendra Albert for organizing this this is Gillian speaking. I'm so excited to build off of jewels in which work who I've both of them I've admired for a long time. So let me begin by offering a guiding premise. Comstock laws in the years immediately before Roe v Wade worked to uphold medical scarcity and also information scarcity. Medical and information scarcity worked hand in glove to make abortion costly stigmatized more dangerous and inaccessible for many. So I want us to think of Comstock laws and their enforcement, not as ubiquitous, not as all consuming, but as producing medical and information deserts that were dotted with OACs. The daunting task, if you were in a desert was to know how to locate the medical OACs and to find a way to get there safely. And that spirit and to think about how the revitalization of Comstock might impact the present. I don't want to make my starting point the 19th century, but the 1960s and early 1970s. In those transformative years, state level enforcement of abortion restrictions still relied upon many Comstock laws, which were the state level laws that mirrored and accentuated federal laws. Now these laws operated not just locally, but against the growing number of countries and us states that permitted abortion. The aim of these laws increasingly became to stop illegal abortions within state lines, but also to curb the flow of information and to stem the persistent medical migration across national and state borders. So let's just take a quick step back. So Comstock laws and Comstock type laws usually forbade the practice of abortion itself, but also forbade advising, aiding, abetting or assisting women to what they called procure miscarriage. And likewise ban the circulation and distribution of material that gave in the words of Florida's law, this was replicated elsewhere as well, but I'm just quoting them for them for the purposes of clarity. Any advice direction information or knowledge that may be obtained for the purpose of causing or procuring miscarriage of any woman pregnant with child. These laws targeting both medical resources and information had a chilling effect. Even as an energized and broad based set of coalitions pushed for abortion law reforms in the 60s and 70s, many abortion seekers remained unable to answer basic questions. And these abortion seekers range from the very poor to the wealthy Comstock laws were a dragnet. And so these women and abortion seekers in general couldn't answer questions like how can I end my pregnancy, where can I obtain an abortion. How will I get there. Can I trust the provider. Can I afford the procedure and what do I do if something goes wrong. So despite the ongoing enforcement of many Comstock laws, abortion referral services and providers continue to appear. Now these services and providers, some of them were motivated by profit, many by compassion sought to break the information chokehold of Comstock laws by directing women to providers. And in doing so they tried to answer the questions I just detailed above. Now for these referral services. No detail was too small. The more meticulous the agency, the more meticulous the detail. But if the devil was in the details and getting seekers from medical deserts to medical oases is so too was the magnification of legal transgressions. The act of aiding through providing information became targeted by police by prosecutors by politicians. So, I want to suggest that information doesn't exist in isolation. It exists in chains both formal and informal. Informal chains were often known as grapefines and they were harder to regulate the more formal services the more formal information services needed visibility to get the word out about their existence. They needed to advertise and even advertising your existence to provide information that second degree of separation to was criminalized. So these services dependent upon helping women get all sorts of knowledge. Are you actually pregnant. Where do you go, which provider. How do you travel. What's the safest route. So early on and again I'm trying to connect information. And the movement from medical deserts to oases services would send abortion seekers to providers abroad places like Mexico, Japan and England, or was either unregulated or legal by the late 60s and early 70s as many states had liberalized their laws. And the travel increased and we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people moving across borders on the eve of row. There still remained informational medical deserts, even as the proliferation of services and information providers continue to flood these areas. So, whether you sent abortion providers at home or abroad. Politicians, police and prosecutors, targeted these providers and information brokers, and they relied on Comstock laws to do so. And charged these folks with conspiracy to commit abortion with aiding and abetting. They targeted advertisements, they targeted newspapers, they targeted billboards. And the success record of these efforts was mixed the closer you get to row increasingly judges were willing to see such laws as violating the First Amendment as being unconstitutionally vague. But what remained fairly consistent. And this is one of the things where the past feels very present was a willingness of authorities to Marshall comp stock to ban advertisements about abortion providers to ban abortion referral services to send their agents pretending to be pregnant people to survey and disrupt these services to monitor providers to read the offices not just to the providers themselves, but of activists and information brokers of all stripes to extradite folks across state lines to face prosecution. So, in our present, when Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, and so on, continuing to tighten their grip on abortion access, not only by banning the procedure, but by having statutes that specify aiding and abetting, offering information that to is a criminal act by incentivizing people to basically snitch on or survey and report those who share the information. What we're seeing is a magnification of state power and return to the idea that in order to stop this awful to break up the information chains that still connect our growing medical deserts to the remaining medical oases. These are all becoming more precarious, even before comp stock has been raised from the dead. Thanks y'all for listening. I mean, I'm sort of a little bit just sitting here in this is Kendra in awe of our, the sort of collective brilliance we've been able to bring together and sort of having my own sort of shock a moment of not knowing where to start. So thank you so, but I'll start by thanking gill jewels and wit and just if y'all want to turn your cameras on so we can sort of start the kind of broader panel of discussion. There's so much to chew on in all of your remarks. And it actually makes me think a little bit about sort of the amendment to the Comstock act in 1996 to include internet services. You know, in light of everything that you've said that it was passed as part of a child protection law that the sort of very explicit goal was to kind of restrict information, you know, and this sort of weird relationship to kind of the sort of the idea of free speech as total like I'm, I'm sort of reconceptualizing that moment, which can seem aberrational from the rest of the history of Comstock as actually just fitting right in, right. So, I think that was that was my sort of takeaway from all of your remarks, but I'm going to just ask a couple of questions but I encourage folks if they have questions for our panelists to please go ahead and feel free to throw them into the into the Q&A. One thing I want to sort of get all of y'all's wisdom on is sort of this idea that we kind of introduced a little bit in the beginning, which is these two divergent histories, right, the history, the story of Comstock with regard to abortion and the story of Comstock with regard to obscenity. Now of course, they're not actually different stories, but Comstock had largely fallen out of conversations about abortion, even despite what you've been talking about Gail in terms of this very real effect of Comstock and the talk of the state level on what was happening. So what are we to make of those like that sort of narrative of these the split of the anti abortion versus anti obscenity mission of Comstock, when, especially because clearly he did not see those as the version what how do y'all think about that that sort of the near that as a narrative that's come to be part of how we understand what happens. And just quickly wit here. I mean one thing that comes to mind I don't think this is a complete explanation by any means I'm just thinking on my feet here but I mean you certainly see a divergence in judicial decisions beginning around I'd say the 1930s in particular with you know increasing legitimization of contraception in particular in the federal courts. And so one of the mechanism that leads to that divergence is that how to put this I mean the use of sort of medical eyes and also social scientific rhetoric benefits the expanded liberalism around contraception in that era whereas it's actually used to repress porn pornography because you know there's this groundswell sort of pop science analysis, particularly around, you know, causing sexual deviance and juvenile delinquency. And so in that sense, you know that that's clearly the, the era of the empowered expert discourse right I mean from everything, you know from national economic policy down to the the administration of sexuality. And so I think that cuts in slightly different ways in that era in ways that do, you know create these diverging paths to the point that you know Comstock stays relevant with pornography and becomes decreasingly relevant for reproductive rights. That's not again not a complete, complete analysis but I think a starting point maybe. Well, to pick up on that this is Jules maybe on the political end to, we could also start to look at the segmenting of political movements and social movements, not just in the sense of separate issues but actually in the, the legacy and of respectability politics of many different varieties so the sort of segmenting of by aligning with the liberal state as we get to certainly the mid century the segmenting of different interests and putting interests as opposable when really the Comstock infrastructure doesn't construe them that way. So the medicalization of abortion that version right as sort of segmented from a reproductive justice framework. But you know you could think about the way that then you know mobilizing against pornography or against gay rights, you know could become a kind of wedge in sort of bargaining with the state to get its blessing for a really tightly regulated form of say abortion by sort of selling out or sacrificing the obscenity side of the equation. I think that might be one of the places where where trans politics fit into this conversation the sort of prehistory to the way that obviously access to the means of transition are so bound with access to abortion and reproductive, you know, means of managing your own life as well, where the, you know, sort of bargain with the blessing of medicalization did nothing to create any kind of meaningful, let alone even really legal right to transition in any particular way and so now it's so easy to see, you know, a bunch of state laws operating in the same sort of mode as the as the anti abortion laws but targeting trans people so so some of that happens on our understanding of political mobilization around both sexuality, gender bodily autonomy and censorship. And I'll just dovetail and build upon what both women jewels have said is that it's not so much that the histories are divergent we can draw a lot of connections between them, and both jewels and what I write to point to the legal decisions and movement politics, both of respectability but also the jurisdiction, but also in the way that many historians have been siloed in telling the stories. And so that, you know, we can look back to Gail Rubin and see her conceptualizing a different sexual regime through Comstock and connecting queer rights obscenity abortion and seeing these as deeply connected and theorizing them, but there are historians of obscenity and pornography there are historians of abortion or reproduction. There are historians of contraception there are trans historians, and in the ways in which we focus our energy in order to tell local stories and bring them to light. Sometimes I think we lose sight of the broader edifice. And so part of, and I so appreciate what Melissa and Kendra are doing today is to bring these into conversation as a mode of thinking about how obscenity was used to regulate information about abortion. How abortion itself was considered obscene in its representations on what could be shown on television, these overlapping histories continued well beyond their actual legal pursuits and the ways in which we tell the story separately. So I'm loving the synthetic conversation in that regard. Well I always appreciate an answer that praises me that's the best kind of answer now but thank you all so much and I think that that's each of you kind of hit on a different sort of aspect of why the stories have been portrayed as divergent. I want to actually pick up on one of the questions in the Q&A which I think also aligned with something that I think I'm really curious about which is a little bit about sort of the role of religion and the religious right. So one question that I kind of you know if I'm going to put it in its more provocative form, you know my question is, is the Alliance defending freedom the new Anthony Comstock right you know how does Comstock as and the sort of more broadly the kind of movement he represented I don't want to make this literally only solely about him although we did in the event after him. What does that relate to kind of this broader kind of broader religious movements broader movements towards questions about kind of morality, separation of church and state. And yeah happy to start with whoever wants to jump in on that one. And I'll be taking off. So I'm not an expert about the adf per se and I appreciate the question in the Q&A and I want to sort of flag right away. As we talk about religion we should always be thinking about religions plural and to see that Comstock and his particular brand of Protestantism didn't exist in a void that he was deeply contested almost immediately by people from across Protestant and Jewish denominations. And so the legacy of Comstock is quite complicated when it comes to sort of religious pursuit Protestants mainline Protestants in particular in alliance with reform Jews and conservative Jews pushed hard almost immediately to challenge the restrictions of information about contraception abortion came significantly later. The debate about pornography and religion is something that needs to be mined a lot further the story that we've told a story of religion and repression. But I want to just draw one broad arc which is to say that if we think about Comstock in a religious setting, we need to see it as one that was an intra and inter religious debate Protestants arguing with Protestants Jews arguing with Jews. Everyone arguing with Catholics to some extent and Catholics arguing with each other. And so it's very important to sort of, I'm just going to leave it at this move away from Capital our religion in this particular moment, but to move specifically to which religious interest and which particular beliefs are getting actualized, both in the past and at this particular moment. And what we're seeing now is a conservative Catholic and evangelical belief that is profoundly anti gay anti abortion and wants to end the debate on contraception is unsettled amongst these groups. And so I'm going to put leave that on the table. Oh, sorry, Jules, go ahead. Well just very briefly this is Jules I was going to say if there are some contrast to be drawn they might have to do with political history and particularly the, you know, and actually a sort of different mode a different relationship to state power right Comstock is is emerging in the Victorian era, you know, moving into the progressive era where there is a sort of, you know widespread kind of movement across political spectrum to grow the arms of the community to create the modern administrative state whereas thinking about the new house speaker in particular. Right, we're talking about a yeah particular right kind of, you know, bargain between evangelical, a certain brand of evangelical Christians and some Catholics around abortion but more broadly, you know, of an extremist kind of political faction that takes a very particular kind of anti state in theory anti government. It's an approach to authoritarianism that also styles itself as the opponent of liberalism, right and that that seems to be like, as sort of disingenuous as that opposition actually is one reason it matters to me to point it out. Right as the adf plays off of that foil, certainly but then like actual liberal political actors also benefit from from the supposed opposition that they you know between themselves and the far right. So they might agree on basic premises of restricting individual liberty and extending state power through the regulation of gender and sexuality. They just like strongly disagree on the degree to which it's acceptable to, you know, to go there so there are some interesting contrasts and differences. And you know it also strikes me that you know the adf isn't the only organization so so perhaps many many many calm stocks which is a disturbing thought but go ahead but sorry to interrupt you. No not at all I mean I think this kind of dovetails off of what both of you have said, um, with here. Yeah just really briefly I mean I do think there's a remarkable organic continuity in the organizations from Anthony Comstock all the way through the adf I mean if you, you know if you look at the genealogy of the Alliance depending freedom it goes back into focus on generally it goes into the people who are on the Meese Commission in the 80s. And I mean those people form the National Center on sexual exploitation which is a mutation of morality and media, which partly, you know again just this genealogy goes directly back you know it's not figurative or metaphorical I mean the personnel are zero degrees of separation from one another, you know as the organizational form morphs. And I think probably, in addition to everything that the Gil and this is maybe so obvious that nobody said it but it bears saying I mean one centerpiece of this from Comstock 3d adf is that you know using state sanctioned sexual morality as a white racial project I mean I think that's a very heavy and obvious storyline that that does, you know put these, all of these organizations into 150 year genealogy that is, you know extraordinarily continuous. And we could say more about that but I'll clear the way for more questions. I am just need like a second to just like assimilate everything this is Melissa. Sorry, there's chaos happening Brooklyn. You know, a lot of the questions that people have put in the Q&A box are about technology and the internet. So I'm going to try to like put some of them together in a way and hope that this touches on as many of them as we can in the time that we have. So, Kendra and I, this is sort of like our origin story, you know is like looking at how the Comstock app was up essentially dragged into the 1990s with the communications decency act. The way that the postal service operated for Comstock becomes applied to the way that the internet is going to look at quote unquote obscenity and all of these other issues under that umbrella. And that is, what peril does that leave us in in this moment, you know, some of the things people brought up or like tick tock not allowing abortion networks and services to advertise and the ways that that impacts the way people get information get if you want to take that piece. And also the ways that, you know, this disrupts information networks that people need to share the information even informally, whether that's around abortion whether that's around sex work whether that's around trans health. I think, you know, this is sort of the, the boon and the doom of the internet is these networks are now like really easy for people who might want to shut them down to do so with levers of power that we didn't necessarily think applied to all these things once, you know, when abortion was legal. So anyone wants to jump in on that we're going to take about, I don't know, seven minutes to do q&a and then if you guys want to stick around we have a little debut of the whole Comstock conference to share with y'all. So just to kick us off and answering this question says, Julie speaking, I mean, I'm not an expert in, you know, studying the internet but but it strikes me that, you know, the peril is vast, and to some extent, difficult to conceptualize in part because of the scale and form of data mining digital surveillance and digital infrastructure that have just arisen, you know, even since the communications decency act was passed, it's sort of like, I don't know, in my armchair engagement with case law on, you know, on social issues and young people's use of the internet and obscenity it feels like it's too easy to, it can be too tempting to be sort of glib and make fun of, of judges not understanding how the internet works or making fun of how Congress members don't understand how the internet works at hearings and in reality, actually speaks to how pervasive and in many ways of difficult to conceptualize and how intangible digital surveillance is so there's certainly sort of classic questions of censorship in terms of, you know, flows of information but I think if we look at the example of the targeting of sex workers in particular in the last 10 years but certainly since the passage of the laws that get abbreviated as sesta and foster whose full titles I unfortunately can never remember. In any case, you can see there how, you know, a historical movement towards utilizing the internet as part of sex work, you know, in the 1990s and early 2000s, completely reshaped the industry in a lot of ways. But then the utilization of obscenity law and passage of these new laws to shut down digital infrastructure to, you know, go after and utilize people's you know internet footprints right as part of prosecutions in particular have not only led to shutting down and a whole bunch of parts of the internet making it incredibly difficult for sex workers that is also, you know, in many ways made a lot of that work more dangerous so it's a classic example of where the supposed protection here right a moral panic around particularly trafficking right actually in particular just ends up harming the very people supposedly it is meant is designed to protect. It just seems to me that that infrastructure right I feel like part of the way I'm understanding it is it's all laying in wait. It's probably being utilized on a local scale by police departments and prosecutors, but in particular it seems to me that one of the big political struggles that is shaping up right now is that you have all of the state surveillance system that has grown up in the last 20 or 30 years. And there are, there is no other than a mass movement that forms who is supposed to oppose that it's not going to be private Silicon Valley tech corporations right, those are not gatekeepers of public interest their track record is abysmal. Right already and and it feels like, nevertheless, that seems to be the kind of public narrative I see certainly in like political media it's like very much the White House versus, you know, tech CEOs like that's, there's only only only a loose loose, you know, kind of a question for me right there so those are just some of my perceptions but like I said, I feel like I'm one of these people who's just trying to think about my own learning curve, you know, both analytically and then politically for movements right that are really concerned about this. So there's a there's a bill, you know, pending in Congress right now that you know it's supposed to protect young people online that a lot of trans activists are very worried could be utilized just to completely shut down trans people's use of the internet or you know, it would work in exactly this kind of way targeting speech associated with trans people are trans topics and that's a really concerning escalation. Right. And so, again, the way that like the sponsor of that bill can't answer questions about that thoughtfully to me seems like really to their advantage of not not an example of their foolishness. I'll just add on one thing, Jules thank you for that that was so great is I want to think a little bit about information hierarchy, moving a little bit about away from the act of policing and surveillance to thinking about what can be shown and what can't be but also the ways in which search to organize information. And that's a big part of the contemporary story now, which is different from in the past in some ways, like taking up space in a billboard was fraught literally, it was criminalized to advertise abortion in certain states on billboards. And there was a lot of cases about that especially in the 70s, after New York legalized, same with inches of column on a newspaper or magazine, or taking out an advertisement in the back pages. These were the sort of old ways of thinking about it. Right now it's about which website shows up first if you type in abortion services. Is it going to be an actual provider that gives a range of options and medical services, or is it going to be someone who's an advocate to move you away from it. And you can see them competing for space at the bottom of like paid promoted results in Google search engine. So a lot of the current debate right now as as much as it is whether you can advertise on Facebook or tick talk for abortion services, or not. The question is also, even in a sort of quote unquote free information market, it's already being structured based upon which dollars and revenue is going into it, and the decisions of who is structuring the algorithm. And I think I don't know enough about that. But in terms of how the sausage gets made there, but I do know that the sort of information hierarchy is actively being shaped and that is something I think that we need to sort of have our fingers off. Well, and maybe since I know we're running out of time. This is wit here, just a very very final comment to route it back to Comstock I think in all of the debates of the last, say, half century, we sort of lost sight of Comstock you know in the wake of Roe v Wade, there was an illegal apparatus chipping away at abortion rights that wasn't wasn't fundamentally premised on the 1873 act. And when it comes to obscenity and, you know, sex on the internet, there's you know we've really focused in recent years on financial regulation corporate regulation you know what is tumblr doing what is Facebook doing what are the credit card companies doing. And I think that left us a little unprepared, you know for this sort of resurgent Comstock fundamentalism in which you know state attorney generals are actually invoking the Comstock act again to attempt, you know, unsuccessfully so far but to curtail, you know, medical abortion materials and and also Moms for Liberty is directly calling for the prosecute criminal prosecution under obscenity law of school librarians you know those, those are new escalating tactics that I think probably is a conversation to pick up on but but it really is you know I think it's sort of Comstock Renaissance on the right that we we really do need to historicize combat. And the very last thing I'll say is that I mean I think civil libertarians made a terrible decision in the 20th century to go with the marketplace of ideas as a model for governing free speech when democracy is in the streets and the right understands that you know Moms for Liberty is astroturfed but they are showing up at school board meetings in a way that I think until very, very recently we have not been, and then we need to be so that that would be my kind of action item call for folks on the call. And I regret to move us along but I will say to everyone. If you like a burning question in your mind like hold it, take a second to write it down. We are going to come back to you this is just the beginning of what are going to be some months of preparing for a conference. So, we would like you just take a step right down the question. And then we're going to tell you a little bit about our conference, one of the questions in the Q&A. If you have a burning thought that I love is what unifying chant would you scream if you were leading multiple intersecting bodily freedom movements gathered to finally excise Comstock's ghost so just like chew on that one for a few minutes for a few months, we will be coming back to you. Sure. So we're, you know, some of us at least our academics which means when we confront on seemingly unsolvable problem, the thing that we want to do is in fact throw a conference. So perhaps the thing that we would scream into the void to excise Comstock's ghost is Comstock on. And then this is sort of what we're hoping to announce we're really, really excited about it it's going to be both an in person and online opportunity to connect co organized by me and Melissa hosted by the initiative for representative first amendment. So we're hoping to basically have a convening that's sort of inspired by this conversation the conversation we're having right to follow up from dubs attacks on bodily autonomy, and to do exactly what gill is saying to sort of bring some of the folks who think about this out of their silos into conversation with each other. So bringing together organizers historians attorneys journalists artists writers, and you know everybody else. So we're hoping to bring together many of those things at the same time to trace the connections between the Comstock Act, its political context, and how it constraints are present. This is Melissa again. So yeah Kendra and I've been cooking this up between us. We've also been gathering people in to be part of putting this on with us. And that's what we're hoping to do today as well if you would like to contribute in some way to com.com please email us email addresses at comms.com.com you can find it there. One thing that I want to highlight is we have an incredible advisory committee who has been working with us for a few months now. And those are folks who are leading voices and movements for bodily autonomy defined broadly reproductive justice sex worker rights disability justice trans justice justice for criminalized survivors. And so far those folks are Daniel Blunt Renee Bracey Sherman, Gillian Frank, Jules Gil Peterson, and Andrea Grimes, and we look forward to also folding in thoughts and ideas and inspirations and in our kick art from anybody to be part of this effort. Our, what we imagine our goal our dream here is to build a constituency as broad and as interconnected as all those people that Anthony Comstock sought to harm, and we hope that you will join us in that. And thank you so much to all of our, to all of our panelists to our ASL interpreters to my colleague jazz at if we're really grateful to all of y'all for joining us and we'll see you in the springtime and we hope to hope to chat with you sooner. Thanks everybody.