Anthony, who? You innocents ask. Anthony Comstock (1844-1915) was the man who made contraception illegal in the United States, the first (maybe only) country to do it. He founded the Society for the Suppression of Vice, which operated in New York City from 1873-1882. He referred to dealers in contraception as “abortionists.” To say he was obsessed with sex is an understatement. In his autobiography, he confessed to masturbating 30 times a day (!). He apparently had a busy childhood, growing up in New Canaan, Connecticut as the child of puritanical parents. It is incredible and appalling that Santorum and other Republicans really want to turn back the clock to the 19th century abyss of Comstockery. I wonder if Rick Santorum had a self-abuse problem as a boy.
As special inspector for the Post Office Department, he got Congress to pass the Comstock Law in 1873, which criminalized the mail, importation, transport in Interstate Commerce anything he considered “obscene literature.” The definition of lewd and lascivious material included The Arabian Nights, and any description of contraception, either its methods or use. Doctors were forbidden to exchange information on the topic of birth control and contraception. That law defining contraceptive information as obscenity remained on the books until 1969.
Comstock claimed he had destroyed over 27,000 pounds of books, 65,000 articles for “immoral use” (rubbers), pushed hundred of women to suicide, had 700 people arrested, and over 300 sent to jail, at hard labor. One of his acolytes was J. Edgar Hoover. He constantly attacked Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman, who referred to his group as “moral eunuchs.” He once hired a group of prostitutes to parade naked before him and his fellow vice suppressors, and had the women arrested for indecent exposure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/... and Population, Evolution, and Birth Control, A Collage of Controversial Ideas, Ed. Garret Hardin; W.H. Freeman, 1964, ISBN 0716706709, (381p).