An anti-obscenity law from 1873 was discarded for decades. Now the anti-choice movement wants it back | Moira Donegan

Anthony Comstock's crusade against women gained him the moniker of moral eunuch'. Today's anti-choice zealots are following in his footsteps

Anthony Comstock thought that his fellow soldiers in the civil war talked about sex too much. When he signed up to serve for the Union in 1863, he saw soldiers behaving the way soldiers tend to do: they drank, and cursed, and made dirty jokes. This spectacle so scandalized Comstock's Christian morality that he devoted the rest of his life - both in public crusades and in his position as inspector of the US Postal Service - to performing what he called weeding in God's garden".

He rallied against women's suffrage, secured the arrest and prosecution of his political enemies, and toured colleges and churches, giving speeches meant to whip his audience into a censorial frenzy. One of his targets, a New York abortion provider called Madame Restell, committed suicide after being entrapped and arrested by Comstock, who had posed as a husband seeking birth control pills. He sent others to jail for selling sex toys, or marketing abortion medications, or preaching free love. In short, Comstock became an anti-obscenity" advocate: one of the most ideological and extreme enforcers of public morality in the nation's history.