So, among other things, the 1873 Act has been dormant and is now apparently just one silly nudge away from waking up to say boo not only to Women but to anyone that needs what might be considered a controversial drug.
If you would like to read the entire post, please go to encyclopedia.com. I was particularly interested in the highlighted section below, and again, Alito brings back the feeling of something wicked coming!
At the turn of the century, 24 states had enacted their own versions of the Comstock Act, many of which were more stringent than the federal statute.
The Comstock Law itself was recodified and reenacted several times in the twentieth century, and prosecutions for violations of the federal statute continued even as Americans became increasingly diverse and tolerant. As a result, several challenges were made to the constitutionality of the Comstock Law, most of them on first amendment grounds. To the surprise of many observers, the U.S Supreme Court continued to uphold the Comstock Law into the 1960s. United States v. Zuideveld, 316 F.2d 873, 875-76, 881 (7th Cir. 1963).
The fate of the Comstock Law began to change, however, when the Supreme Court announced its decision in miller v. california, 413 U.S. 15, 93 S. Ct. 2607, 37 L. Ed. 2d 419 (1973). In Miller the Supreme Court ruled that material is obscene if (1) the work, taken as a whole by an average person applying contemporary community standards, appeals to the prurient interest; (2) the work depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way; and (3) the work, when taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Although the Comstock Law was never challenged on grounds that it violated the Miller standards for obscenity, the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional in 1983.
In Bolger v. Youngs Drug Products Corp., 463 U.S. 60, 103 S. Ct. 2875, 77 L. Ed. 2d 469 (1983), the Supreme Court re-examined the reasons underlying the Comstock Law (then codified at 39 USCA § 3001) in light of the First Amendment standards governing commercial speech, which allow the government to regulate false, deceptive, and misleading advertisements if the regulation is supported by a substantial governmental interest. The Court concluded that the Comstock Law did not meet this burden. The government’s interest in purging all mailboxes of advertisements for contraceptives is more than offset, the Court said, by the harm that results in denying the mailbox owners the right to receive truthful information bearing on their ability to practice birth control or start a family.
“We have previously made clear,” the Court emphasized, “that a restriction of this scope is more extensive than the Constitution permits, for the government may not reduce the adult population … to reading only what is fit for children.”
Source: encyclopedia
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