Please call on President Biden to posthumously pardon 19th century freethought publisher D.M. Bennett, a victim of the Comstock Act.
FFRF is joining an official pardon campaign filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The campaign to pardon Bennett will not only provide important symbolic justice to a wronged freethinker, but will call attention to the continuing dangers of the religiously motivated Comstock Act. FIRE Chief Counsel Robert Corn-Revere. who is leading the pardon repeal, was the guest on FFRF’s newest “Ask An Atheist” program, which you can view by clicking here.
Bennett, who founded and published the most famous and influential freethought newspaper of the 19th century, The Truthseeker, was arrested and convicted for violating the Comstock Act in 1879. He was sentenced and served 13 months of hard labor simply for mailing a copy of “Cupid’s Yokes, or the Binding Forces of Conjugal Life,” which questioned patriarchal marriage and said women should have the right to control their own bodies.
Anthony Comstock, the zealous fundamentalist charged with enforcing the eponymous federal law he persuaded Congress to pass, first arrested Bennett for publishing “An Open Letter to Jesus Christ.” Undoubtedly, the motivation to go after Bennett was his active work to the repeal of the Comstock Act, which criminalized the mailing of so-called “obscene” materials, including contraception and abortifacients. That “zombie” statute was ominously called “good law” by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas during recent oral arguments on the mifepristone pill. FFRF supports legislation to repeal the Comstock Act in Congress.
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