Women’s Tennis Tour Ends Peng Shuai-Inspired China Boycott

By The Associated Press

April 13, 2023

China's Peng Shuai serves to Japan's Nao Hibino during their first round singles match at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne, Australia, on Jan. 21, 2020. (Andy Brownbill/AP Photo)

The women’s professional tennis tour will bring its events back to China later this year, announcing on Thursday the end of a boycott instituted in late 2021 over concerns about the safety of former player Peng Shuai after she accused a high-ranking official there of sexual assault.

WTA Chairman and CEO Steve Simon said in an interview with The Associated Press that while what he sought was never delivered—a chance for someone from the tour to meet with Peng, along with a full and transparent investigation into the Grand Slam doubles champion’s accusations—the decision was made, with input from player and tournament representatives, to return to the country.

“The stance that we took at the time was appropriate. And we stand by that. But 16 months into this, we’re convinced that our requests will not be met. And to continue with the same strategy doesn’t make sense,” Simon said from St. Petersburg, Florida, where the WTA is based.

“So we needed to look at a different approach. With this, our members believe it’s time to resume the mission in China, where we believe we can continue to make a positive difference, as we have for the last 20 years, while at the same time making sure that Peng is not forgotten. By returning, hopefully more progress can be made.”

Although there have been no reports of Peng sightings in public since carefully orchestrated appearances during the Beijing Olympics in February 2022, Simon said the WTA has “received assurances from people who are close to her, that we’ve been in contact with, that she is safe and living with her family in Beijing.”

He added that the tour has been assured by the Chinese Tennis Association, the sport’s national governing body, that “there won’t be any issues with our athletes or our staff while they’re competing within the region.”

He called the change in course “an organizational decision” and noted: “The great majority of the athletes were supportive and wanted to see a return … and felt it was time to go back.”

The tour’s schedule in China should be revealed in the next couple of weeks, Simon said. It will begin in September and include the season-ending WTA Finals in Shenzhen and other stops similar to what was played in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic led to a round of cancellations.

Peng, now 37, won doubles trophies at Wimbledon and the French Open and reached the No. 1 ranking in doubles; in singles, she was a U.S. Open semifinalist and was ranked as high as No. 14. She dropped out of public view after saying in a social media post in November 2021 that former vice premier Zhang Gaoli forced her to have sex. The post was quickly taken down by Chinese authorities.

The following month, Simon—with the backing of the WTA Board of Directors, players, tournaments and sponsors—said the tour would suspend play in China. That was the strongest public stand against China by a sports body and cost the WTA millions of dollars in revenue.

Peng later tried to recant, including in a controlled interview during last year’s Winter Games. After the Olympics, the global attention and outrage raised by her case—“ Where is Peng Shuai? ” was a popular rallying cry, a T-shirt slogan seen at Grand Slam tournaments, a trending topic on social media—seems to have lessened.

The ATP men’s tennis tour and the International Tennis Federation, which oversees the Billie Jean King Cup and Davis Cup along with lower-level tournaments for individual players, recently said they would resume operations in China after staying away because of COVID-19.

The ITF said Thursday it welcomed the WTA’s decision to resume play in China.

“Regarding Peng Shuai, while she appears safe and well, we will continue to seek assurances about her ongoing safety and welcome all other organizations’ efforts to support her, both publicly and behind the scenes,” ITF President David Haggerty said.

Back when he first delivered the news about leaving China, Simon told the AP: ”The one thing that we can’t do is walk away from this, because if we’re walking away from the key elements—which is obviously not only her well-being, but the investigation—then we’re telling the world that not addressing sexual assault with respect to the seriousness it requires is OK, because it’s too difficult. And it’s simply something that we can’t let happen.”

Asked whether Thursday’s move could be construed by some as backing down, Simon replied: “Well, everybody will have their own opinions on that, for sure. I can understand how someone might look at it that way, for sure. But we took a stand that no one else has. And, I think, from that, we did receive some things that we didn’t think we would get, as well,” citing the assurances about Peng’s safety and that of WTA players and staff upon return to China.

By Howard Fendrich

 

China’s Crackdown On Flamboyant Billionaires – Analysis

 April 14, 2023  

By East Asia Forum

By Martin Miszerak*

In March 2023, China’s National People’s Congress announced the establishment of a Central Finance Commission, a ‘super-regulator’ tasked with the supervision and overhaul of the entire financial sector. The new body is to be chaired by none other than Chinese President Xi Jinping. The Commission’s first ‘unofficial’ financial restructuring may well have been the mid-February disappearance of billionaire investment banker Bao Fan.

Bao is the founder and chairman of China Renaissance, the country’s top investment bank. The disappearance of Bao Fan remains a mystery, although a rumour later circulated that he was ‘cooperating’ with an investigation by ‘certain authorities’.

Bao Fan is not the first Chinese billionaire to vanish. He follows in the footsteps of Jack Ma, founder of the e-commerce giant Alibaba and former controlling shareholder of Ant Group. Ant Group was a financial services powerhouse scheduled to go public in Hong Kong in November 2020 in the biggest initial public offering (IPO) ever. Jack Ma disappeared shortly after he delivered a speech in Shanghai which was highly critical of the Chinese banking sector and its regulators.

The IPO was put on hold and Ant Group has been subjected to extensive restructuring. Jack Ma unexpectedly reappeared in mainland China in late March 2023, presumably as a part of the government’s initiative to improve sentiment among the private sector. It is not clear how long the government will allow him to stay on the mainland, but any executive role in Ant Group is over for him.

Bao Fan’s business philosophy sheds some light on the possible circumstances of his disappearance. Bao was an unabashedly global citizen but doing business in an environment of intensifying nationalism and authoritarianism under Xi Jinping. The son of Chinese diplomats, he lived a privileged youth, with the ability to travel internationally and attend high school in the United States. Armed with a Master of Business Administration, he spent several years working for investment banks Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley. Bao was a titan of China’s technology and finance industries and his fame lay in his unceasing focus on networking and deal-making.

While Bao’s company China Renaissance operates a wealth management division, the company’s core business was investment banking, accounting for 44 per cent of its total revenue in 2021. Given his focus on deal-making, it is hard to imagine Bao Fan spending much time on the study of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, which may have been a fatal error.

Bao operated on the model of a flamboyant ‘master banker’ and ‘rainmaker’, reminiscent of the late US investment banker Bruce Wasserstein, who also bolted out of First Boston (today Credit Suisse) to set up his boutique investment bank and later led the buyout and IPO of Lazard Freres. China Renaissance’s business model eerily resembles that of Lazard Freres, which is generally thought to be home to ‘swashbuckling’ star bankers.

Bao Fan’s flamboyance and aggressive deal-making as ‘king’ of the platform tech industry were incompatible with Xi Jinping’s Marxist vision for the financial sector. Under Xi’s vision, the financial sector should be limited to supporting China’s manufacturing sectors, particularly those prioritised in Made in China 2025. While Xi Jinping is not against the private sector and Premier Li Qiang has repeatedly affirmed China’s commitment to the private sector, their imperative is for the private sector to be under Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control and promote party objectives.

There is no room for someone like Bao Fan within such a private sector model. For Xi, an ideal entrepreneur is someone like Ren Zhengfei, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Huawei. Ren blends unquestionable entrepreneurial talents with a dedication to communism and Mao Zedong, after whom he ‘fashions himself’ and the company. He reads the Selected Works of Mao Zedong in his spare time.

It is difficult to be optimistic about the future of either Bao Fan or China Renaissance. The ‘reappearance’ of Bao Fan as if nothing had happened is highly unlikely. He is much more likely to follow in the footsteps of Jack Ma, either remaining incommunicado under house arrest or being forced into exile.

China Renaissance is likely to follow in the path of Ant Group by ‘inviting’ a major state-owned shareholder and demoting Bao Fan to minority status. Such restructuring would redirect China Renaissance away from the platform tech companies and toward Xi Jinping’s industrial policies. A new chairman appointed by the CCP will be anything but flamboyant, as there is simply no room for flamboyant investment bankers in Xi Jinping’s capitalism with Chinese characteristics.

*About the author: Martin Miszerak is Visiting Professor at SolBridge International School of Business and Adjunct Lecturer at Renmin Business School, Renmin University.

Source: This article was published by East Asia Forum

East Asia Forum is a platform for analysis and research on politics, economics, business, law, security, international relations and society relevant to public policy, centred on the Asia Pacific region. It consists of an online publication and a quarterly magazine, East Asia Forum Quarterly, which aim to provide clear and original analysis from the leading minds in the region and beyond.

ASEAN Condemns Killings Of ‘At Least Dozens Of’ Civilians In Myanmar Airstrike

This image grab from a video shows the aftermath of shelling and airstrikes by Burmese junta forces on Pa Zi Gyi, a village in Kanbalu township in the Sagaing region of Myanmar, April 11, 2023. [Citizen journalist via RFA]

 April 14, 2023 

By BenarNews

By Pizaro Gozali Idrus

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations finally came out on Thursday to condemn the slaughter of as many as 130 people in an airstrike by Burmese junta forces on a village in Myanmar’s Sagaing region this week.

A fighter-jet dropped two bombs on Pa Zi Gyi, a village in Kanbalu Township, and two Mi-35 attack helicopters strafed the crowd with gunfire, eyewitnesses said, after hundreds of villagers had gathered for an office opening ceremony on Tuesday, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported.

Women and children were among the dead. It was one of the most lethal strikes by the junta on civilians since the Burmese military seized power in a February 2021 coup. 

Indonesia, the 2023 holder of the ASEAN chair, issued the statement on the Southeast Asian bloc’s behalf two days after the United Nations and United States came out with statements deploring the attack.

“ASEAN strongly condemns the reported recent air strikes carried out by the Myanmar Armed Forces in Pa Zi Gyi Village, Kanbalu Township, Sagaing Region of Myanmar, that claimed the lives of at least dozens of civilians,” the ASEAN chair said.

“All forms of violence must end immediately, particularly the use of force against civilians,” it added. “This would be the only way to create a conducive environment for an inclusive national dialogue to find a sustainable peaceful solution in Myanmar.”

The 10-member bloc, whose members include Myanmar and which operates largely by consensus, has been widely criticized for failing to take strong action against the Burmese junta.

The military has carried on with attacks amid nationwide turmoil in the nearly two years since the junta chief agreed to follow a five-point peace framework that ASEAN leaders agreed to during an emergency summit on post-coup Myanmar.

In Jakarta on Thursday, an aide to Indonesian President Joko Widodo declined to comment in response to a query from BenarNews about the ASEAN statement. Indonesia’s foreign ministry spokesman and director-general for ASEAN matters did not immediately respond to questions on whether the regional bloc would back up its strongly worded statement with punitive action against Naypyidaw.

In Sagaing, witnesses said it was hard to tell how many people were killed in Tuesday’s aerial attack because the bodies were so badly mangled by the bombs and machine-gun fire.

As of Thursday, the death toll had risen to 130 people, according to a report by RFA Burmese that cited information from a rescue team of volunteers in the village. RFA is a news organization affiliated with BenarNews.

Amid the carnage, the military had deployed a surveillance helicopter and stationed troops on the outskirts of Pa Zi Gyi, impeding efforts to collect body parts and bring the wounded for medical treatment, residents said.

The Burmese military confirmed in a statement on Tuesday evening that it had carried out a “precision” attack on Pa Zi Gyi because, it said, members of the anti-junta People Defense Force paramilitary group had gathered there and “committed terrorist acts” in the area.

Junta Deputy Information Minister Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun told the military-controlled broadcast channel MRTV that those killed in the strike were members of the PDF – not civilians – and that the large number of casualties was the result of a rebel weapons cache exploding during the operation.

But a rescue worker who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing security concerns, said this was false. The attack on the site was deliberate and thorough, beginning with a fighter-jet bombing run followed by the helicopters strafing the area, the source told RFA.

Myanmar has been in turmoil since the military ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021, provoking mass protests and armed resistance. More than 3,200 civilians have been killed by the military since then, according to U.N. estimates.

Since April 2021, Myanmar’s military rulers have ignored a blueprint for peace agreed to by Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the Burmese junta chief, and leaders of ASEAN member-states at the emergency summit in Jakarta. Among its provisions, the five-point consensus, called for an end to violence, dialogue with all parties and humanitarian assistance.

BenarNews’ mission is to provide readers with accurate news and information that reflects the complex and ever-changing world around them. With homepages in Bengali, Thai, Bahasa Malaysia, Bahasa Indonesia and English, BenarNews brings timely news to its diverse audience. Copyright BenarNews. Used with the permission of BenarNews

Death toll in Myanmar air strike rises to 165, while threat of attack remains

Rescue workers say they are frantically cremating bodies amid the risky security situation.

By RFA Burmese
2023.04.13

Relief workers cremate body parts from people killed by the Myanmar military junta’s strike on Pa Zi Gyi village, Kanbalu township, Sagaing region on April 11, 2023.

 Citizen Journalist

The number of people killed in an air strike seen as one of the worst attacks on civilians by Myanmar’s junta since a military coup two years ago has risen to 165, the country’s shadow government said Thursday.

The attack, in which jets bombed and helicopters strafed the opening ceremony for a public administration building in northern Myanmar’s Sagaing region on Tuesday, is the latest example of the military’s increasing reliance on air power in its multifront conflict with armed resistance groups, who have enjoyed growing success on the ground.

Rescue worker Nway Oo told RFA Burmese that 130 bodies had been cremated as of Thursday morning. But he said workers are struggling to comb through unidentified remains amid the ongoing threat of a military attack. Hours after the air strike on Tuesday, junta troops again attacked the site, killing three rescue workers.

“The gender of some of the bodies cannot be determined,” Nway Oo said. “Some of their bodies were too disfigured to even identify whether they were male or female.”

The remains of only 59 people were identifiable, he said, while the rest of the bodies “had to be picked up part by part and buried.”

Initial reports from the site in Kanbalu township’s Pa Zi Gyi village said at least 83 bodies had been cremated, including those of 22 minors, although sources told RFA Burmese that rescue efforts and the collection of remains had been hampered by by a continued military presence in the area, as well as the scale of the devastation from the attack. 

Witnesses have said that it was hard to tell how many people had died because the bodies were so badly mangled by the bombs and machine gun fire.

The country’s shadow National Unity Government – made up of members of the former civilian government and other individuals who oppose the junta – announced that the death toll at Pa Zi Gyi had risen to 165, including 27 women and 19 minors. In a statement, the NUG said efforts are still underway to identify victims and that the number of dead is “likely to increase.”

While the statement did not include the exact number of people injured by the air strike, it said at least 17 people had been “seriously wounded” and underwent major surgery.

Ongoing threat of attack

Residents told RFA military jets have occasionally been seen flying over the village to survey the site, while a column of more than 80 troops has been stationed around two miles to the east.

Ko Myo, a resident of Pa Zi Gyi, said rescue workers were frantically cremating remains amid the risky security situation.

“We have brought in some car tires [to build pyres],” he said. “We’ve had to [cremate] urgently, as the military’s planes are still flying around. We have to collect as many bodies as possible and cremate them before we leave.”

The aftermath of the airstrike on Pa Zi Gyi village in Sagaing region's Kanbalu township, Myanmar, Tuesday, April 11, 2023. Credit: Kyunhla Activists Group via AP

Meanwhile, Pa Zi Gyi has become a ghost town, as more than 800 residents of the 100-home village have fled since the attack and are too frightened to return while the threat of another raid looms, Ko Myo said.

A resident who gave his name as Maung Oo told RFA he had lost six family members in the air strike, and said he will never forgive the junta for carrying out such a brutal act.

“My youngest brother, brother-in-law, grandfather, aunties, niece and nephews were among the dead,” he said, calling those responsible for the attack “animals.”

“We must take up any available weapons and fight back. I will never stop fighting them even if I have to give up my life.”

Holding the junta accountable

Naw Susanna Hla Hla Soe, the NUG’s minister of women, youths and children affairs, said the shadow government is working to hold the junta accountable for Tuesday’s attack and other atrocities visited on the people of Myanmar.

“Attacks targeting innocent civilians are very serious war crimes … under both international and domestic laws,” she said. “That is why we are working to prosecute those who are responsible in both local and international criminal courts.”

The military confirmed in a statement on Tuesday evening that it had carried out a “precision” attack on Pa Zi Gyi because members of the anti-junta People Defense Force paramilitary group had gathered there and “committed terrorist acts” in the area.

Junta Deputy Information Minister Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun told the military-controlled broadcast channel MRTV that those killed in the strike were members of the PDF, not civilians, and that the large number of casualties was the result of a rebel weapons cache exploding during the operation.

But rescue workers have disputed that account. They say the attack on the site was deliberate and thorough, beginning with a jet fighter bombing run and followed by an Mi-35 helicopter strafing the area.

Residents of Pa Zi Gyi whose family members were killed have called on the international community to take effective action against the junta and to block sales of jet fuel, weapons and ammunition to the regime.

On Thursday, Indonesia, the 2023 chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, issued a statement on the bloc’s behalf two days after the United Nations and United States condemned the attack.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

ASEAN 'strongly condemns' Myanmar

army's deadly strikes against civilians

Is international law capable of dealing with Myanmar?

Aung San Suu Kyi says Rohingya crisis "could have been handled better"

Regional bloc urgest Myanmar to fully implement a deal, which calls for an end to violence and dialogue between the military government and rebels.ASEAN chair Indonesia calls for a consensus that would be the only way to create a conducive environment for an inclusive national dialogue in Myanmar. (ASEAN)

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) "strongly condemns" recent air strikes in Myanmar in which dozens of people were reported killed, the current chair of the bloc Indonesia has said in a statement,

"All forms of violence must end immediately, particularly the use of force against civilians", added the Thursday's statement.

A statement issued by the ASEAN chair does not necessarily indicate the agreement of all member states.

The official death toll from Tuesday morning's strike on the remote Kanbalu township in Myanmar's central Sagaing region remains unclear, though at least 100 fatalities including many civilians have been reported by the BBC, The Irrawaddy, and Radio Free Asia.

The military government confirmed on Wednesday it had "launched limited air strikes" after receiving a tip-off from locals about an event marking the opening of a local defence force office connected to the military government's opponents.

The attack drew swift condemnation from the United Nations and Western powers.

READ MORE: Myanmar confirms deadly air strike that is feared to have killed 100

Witnesses and media reports say dozens of villagers in central Myanmar have been killed in an air attack carried out Tuesday by Myanmar junta. (AP)

Consensus on cessation of hostilities

Indonesia — Southeast Asia's biggest economy — is serving as the 2023 chair of ASEAN and will host the 10-member bloc's annual leaders' meetings in May and September.

Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said last week that Jakarta had been working hard to implement the "Five-Point Consensus" agreed with the Myanmar junta in April 2021, which calls for an end to violence and dialogue between the military and rebels.

But the plan has been largely ignored by the junta and mediation attempts by ASEAN countries to solve the crisis have so far failed.

Jakarta's chairmanship of the bloc had raised hopes ASEAN could push for a peaceful solution in Myanmar, using Indonesia's weight as a regional economic power and its diplomatic experience.

Indonesia earlier this year announced plans to set up a special envoy's office under the foreign ministry to establish a low-level dialogue with the junta, though little information has emerged about the status of any talks.

The junta remains an ASEAN member but has been barred from top-level summits over its failure to implement the peace plan.

Following the coup that toppled Aung San Suu Kyi's civilian government in 2021, a military crackdown on dissent and armed groups opposed to their rule has left more than 3,200 people dead, according to a local monitoring group.

READ MORE: Thousands flee Myanmar into Thailand amid clashes between military, rebels

Boston adopts new building code to limit use of fossil fuels

BOSTON (AP) — Boston Mayor Michelle Wu on Thursday signed a new city ordinance aimed at discouraging the use of fossil fuels in the construction of new buildings and major renovation projects.

The ordinance requires that new buildings that rely on fossil fuels install solar panels and additional wiring in anticipation of a future conversion to electrification with the goal of most new buildings going all-electric.

Wu signed the measure at an event at the Museum of Science. The Boston City Council approved the ordinance last week on an 8-4 vote.

The action makes Boston the largest city in Massachusetts to implement the code, which was finalized by the state last year. Brookline and Watertown were the first two communities to adopt the code earlier this year.

Several other communities have embraced similar efforts.

In Boston, 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from the building sector, according to Wu. The mayor has said the emissions from buildings contribute both to global climate change and to local air pollution that disproportionately harms low-income residents and communities of color in the city.

“Building a Green New Deal city means improving on our existing infrastructure as well as investing in future resilient development,” Wu said in a statement when she unveiled the proposal last month. “This new green building code will help ensure that we set the foundation for healthy, resilient growth throughout our neighborhoods.”

The updated energy code will deliver improved air quality, lower energy costs and reduced carbon emissions, Wu said.

Wu also announced last month that the city will use $10 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds to improve energy performance at the city’s affordable housing developments.

The announcement comes after Massachusetts lawmakers adopted a new law last year meant to encourage communities to embrace fossil fuel-free codes for new construction.

While Wu’s proposal stops short of that, she has expressed interest in taking even more aggressive steps. Wu has said she wants Boston to participate in a new pilot program included in the 2022 law.

Under that program, 10 cities and towns will be allowed to fully prohibit fossil fuels from new construction and major renovations as long as each community first meets the 10% affordable housing target set by state law and also exempts life sciences labs and health care facilities from the all-electric requirements.

Environmentalists have called on the state to go even further by allowing any city or town to ban oil, gas and other fossil fuels in the construction of buildlings.

A 19th-century anti-sex crusader is the “pro-life” movement’s new best friend

Anthony Comstock, the 19th-century scourge of art and sex, is suddenly relevant again thanks to Donald Trump’s worst judge.

By Ian Millhiser Apr 12, 2023

LONG READ

Portrait of anti-sex activist Anthony Comstock, 1913. Gado/Getty Images

Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.

The Comstock Act, an 1873 federal law signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, is a relic of an era when free speech, medical privacy, and other rights that modern-day Americans take for granted effectively did not exist.

Nearly every word of this law, which is named after the Gilded Age anti-sex crusader Anthony Comstock, is unconstitutional — at least under the understanding of the Constitution that prevailed for nearly all of the past 60 years. The Comstock Act purports to make it a crime to mail “every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article, matter, thing, device, or substance,” or to mail any “thing” for “any indecent or immoral purpose” — vague words that inspired a century of litigation just to determine what concepts like “obscenity” actually mean.

And now, this puritanical law is back in vogue with the anti-abortion right wing.

A Trump-appointed judge who recently attempted to ban mifepristone, a drug used in more than half of all abortions in the United States, wrote an opinion that repeatedly cites a provision of the Comstock Act that also purports to ban “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use” from being mailed.

Anthony Comstock, who died in 1915, never held high government office. The only federal office he ever held was an appointment as a postal inspector — a law enforcement position that gave him the power to enforce the law that bears his name. Yet wielding this office and using the authority given to him in his primary job as secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV), Comstock became the scourge of artists, authors, birth control activists, abortion providers, and pornographers.

At the height of his power, in 1883, Comstock successfully brought charges against an art gallery owner who sold high-quality reproductions of famous nude paintings — including Alexandre Cabanel’s masterpiece The Birth of Venus. A court deemed the paintings to be criminally obscene, and the art was seized.

Alexandre Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus, one of many works of art that Comstock censored. Public domain via Wikipedia

Worse, Comstock pursued providers of abortions and birth control with a religious zeal that bordered on homicidal. In 1878, after Comstock had Madame Restell, a well-known abortion provider, arrested for the crime of selling contraceptive pills, the 67-year-old Restell died by suicide. As law professor Geoffrey Stone wrote in his 2017 book Sex and the Constitution, “Comstock later boasted that Restell was the fifteenth target of his investigation to commit suicide.”

Not long after Comstock’s death, federal courts began to limit the scope of his law. And the law has largely lain dormant for half a century, suppressed by a pair of Supreme Court decisions handed down the same year: Miller v. California (1973), which drastically limits the government’s power to prosecute obscenity, and Roe v. Wade (1973), the now-defunct decision protecting abortion rights.

But the federal judiciary recently entered a new era. Roe is now gone. Former President Donald Trump remade the federal courts, and longstanding rights that millions of Americans took for granted are now on the chopping block.

Meanwhile, men like Matthew Kacsmaryk, the Trump judge behind the attack on mifepristone, is openly scheming to revive Anthony Comstock’s legacy.

An obscure shopkeeper became one of the most powerful censors in American history

Anthony Comstock saw the devil in everything.

In his 1883 book Traps for the Young, Comstock wrote that newspapers, magazines, novels, and even fine art were snares used by Satan “to capture our youth and secure the ruin of immortal souls.” To fight the devil, Comstock claimed, Christians must eradicate the very words that encourage lust and licentiousness. There is “no more active agent employed by Satan,” Comstock wrote, than “EVIL READING.”

Yet, as a young man just a few years out of a Civil War stint in the Union Army, Comstock seemed unlikely to someday turn his censorious vision into a reality. Working at a dry goods shop in postwar Manhattan, Comstock complained often to local authorities about nearby saloons and publishers of sexually explicit materials, and was frequently ignored. “Crime stalketh abroad by daylight,” he complained in his diary, “and Public officers wink at it.”

The turning point in Comstock’s life came after he wrote a letter to an official at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), complaining that he had pushed for criminal prosecutions against the smut peddlers he perceived around him but could not secure convictions.

At the time, the YMCA was known less for the network of affordable suburban gyms where many modern-day children play, and more for its efforts at vice suppression. Leaders of the Y in New York City successfully lobbied for state legislation banning obscene art and literature, and they needed an investigator to sniff out violations of this law and bring the violators to justice. Anthony Comstock was the man for this job.

It was this alliance with many of New York’s wealthiest and most prudish men that powered Comstock’s career as an anti-vice crusader. Working first under the auspices of the YMCA, and then later under the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock led a multi-state effort to find sexual materials, destroy them, and arrest anyone responsible for distributing them.

As art historian Amy Werbel writes in Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock, in seven years of work for the YMCA, Comstock played a key role in “seizing and destroying 134,000 pounds of books, 194,000 ‘bad pictures and photographs,’ [...] and 60,300 ‘articles made of rubber for immoral purposes, and used by both sexes.’” His work also led to 106 arrests across the states of New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut.

Comstock’s most consequential accomplishment, however, was the federal legislation formally titled “A bill for the suppression of trade in, and circulation of, obscene literature and articles of immoral use” — the law now widely known as the Comstock Act.

The law that bears Comstock’s name was not drafted by Comstock himself. But it was Anthony Comstock who successfully lobbied Congress to pass the bill by setting up an exhibition of sexualized art and other material he acquired as the YMCA’s anti-vice detective in Vice President Schuyler Colfax’s room in the United States Capitol.

Two months later, the New York legislature incorporated the NYSSV, which would employ Comstock for the remainder of his life. The new organization’s official logo left little doubt about its purpose. It is bifurcated, with an image of a man being led off by a police officer on the one side, as another man burns a pile of books on the other

.

New York Society for the Suppression of Vice

Indeed, at the height of his authority, Comstock was simultaneously a federal postal inspector and the central figure in the NYSSV. And, while the NYSSV was technically a private organization, a state law required New York police to assist it in enforcing the state’s vice laws. So Comstock effectively had the power to enforce both federal and state law against individuals he wished to censor.
Laws like the Comstock Act are relics of an era when constitutional rights barely existed

On the day President Grant signed the Comstock Act into law, free speech rights, at least as we know them today, did not exist.

The Supreme Court held in Barron v. Baltimore (1833) that the Bill of Rights contains “no expression indicating an intention to apply them to the state governments” — thus giving states full authority to encroach on free speech. And Supreme Court decisions placing strict limits on the scope of anti-obscenity laws were not handed down until well into the 20th century. Similarly, the earliest Supreme Court decisions establishing a “right to privacy,” which shields Americans from encroachment on their family and sexual lives, were many decades away.

While Comstock was still alive and arresting booksellers and gallery owners, many American courts followed the “Hicklin test,” named after an English court’s decision in Regina v. Hicklin (1868), which gave the government broad discretion to prosecute materials it deemed to be obscene. The Supreme Court endorsed this Hicklin test in Rosen v. United States (1896).

Under Hicklin, art, literature, or similar materials may be banned if they tend to “to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” Hicklin, in other words, permitted the government to ban artistic nudes, erotic writing, and other allegedly obscene art so long as a court deemed that the youngest and most impressionable minds might be corrupted by it.

Yet, while Comstock benefited from sympathetic courts for much of his crusade against human sexuality, that sympathy rapidly began to fade after his death in 1915.
Much of modern-day constitutional law was developed in opposition to Comstockian censorship

Werbel argues in her book that “the sheer, massive volume of cases initiated by Comstock” dramatically accelerated the development of numerous areas of US law, including “separation of church and state, protection from unwanted search and seizure, the right to privacy, and freedom from entrapment,” by forcing lawyers to flesh out concepts of individual rights that were underdeveloped before Comstock started prosecuting publishers, artists, and health providers.

“Ironically and significantly,” Werbel claims, “Comstock can be credited almost single-handedly with instigating the foundations of a First Amendment Bar.”

Just days after Comstock died — and decades before Supreme Court decisions like Roe and Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) formally recognized a constitutional right to reproductive health care — the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that the Comstock Act must be given a “reasonable construction” to permit physicians to advertise that they will perform lifesaving abortions. Similarly, in a particular influential decision handed down a generation later, the Second Circuit concluded in United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries (1936) that the Comstock Act should only be read to ban items used for “unlawful” abortions from the mails.

Based on these and similar decisions, the Justice Department recently concluded that the Comstock Act, as construed by the courts, “does not prohibit the mailing of” common abortion drugs such as mifepristone “where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient will use them unlawfully.” So, at the very least, no one should be prosecuted under the Comstock Act for mailing an abortion medication to a recipient in a state where abortion is legal.

By the middle of the 20th century, the Supreme Court took a similar approach to the Comstock Act’s provisions prohibiting so-called obscenity — reading the law narrowly rather than striking it down in its entirety. A key turning point was Roth v. United States (1957), which abandoned the Hicklin test in favor of a new rule.

Rather than insisting that all art must be acceptable for the most impressionable minds, Roth held that supposedly obscene materials may only be banned if the “average person, applying contemporary community standards” would determine that “the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest.” Under Roth, prosecutions under the Comstock Act or similar laws must overcome this much higher bar than the one announced in Hicklin.

The Court changed this rule somewhat in Miller v. California (1973), but Miller still looks to the views of the “average person, applying contemporary community standards” and not to the impact of a work on the most impressionable consumers. As Stone writes, this formula proved fatal to nearly all obscenity prosecutions.

“Shifting cultural values, and the advent of new technologies,” such as video tapes, DVDs, and the internet, “simply overwhelmed the capacity of the law to constrain sexual expression,” Stone says in Sex and the Constitution. And, “as the flood of sexual material outpaced the capacity of prosecutors to respond, community standards soon became more tolerant of what would once have been regarded as ‘patently offensive’ depictions of sex.”

Yet, while modern constitutional doctrines protect against the kind of censorship and criminalization of sexuality that fueled Anthony Comstock’s career, it’s important to recognize that many of these doctrines are fairly recent. They did not exist in our great-grandparents’ era, and they could easily be swept away again by more puritanical judges.

Judges like Matthew Kacsmaryk. Or, potentially, like the five Supreme Court justices who voted to overrule Roe v. Wade.
So what’s going to happen to the Comstock Act now?

Matthew Kacsmaryk, the Trump judge behind the attack on mifepristone, shares Comstock’s obsession with other people’s sexuality

Kacsmaryk has claimed that being transgender is a “mental disorder,” and that gay people are “disordered.” In a 2015 article, he denounced a so-called “Sexual Revolution,” which “sought public affirmation of the lie that the human person is an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.”

In addition to his decision seeking to ban a common abortion medication, Kacsmaryk has handed down decisions attacking the right to contraception, and attempting to neutralize a federal ban on LGBTQ discrimination by health providers.

Kacsmaryk’s opinion in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, the mifepristone case, partially rests on the proposition that, now that Roe has been overruled, the Comstock Act’s ban on mailing abortion medications has roared back into full effect. He rejects the limited reading of the act announced in decisions like One Package, claiming that “the plain text of the Comstock Act controls.”

It’s a bracing conclusion. But it’s also one of the few arguments in Kacsmaryk’s poorly reasoned legal opinion that cannot be simply laughed off as ridiculous.

To be clear, the Comstock Act does not permit Kacsmaryk to ban mifepristone, no matter what he might claim in his embarrassment of a legal opinion. Kacsmaryk does not even have jurisdiction over the Hippocratic Medicine case, and the case was filed outside of the six-year statute of limitations for challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to approve a drug. Federal law also requires the Hippocratic Medicine plaintiffs to raise any claim that the Comstock Act prevents the FDA from approving mifepristone to the FDA itself before they can file a federal lawsuit making this claim. And they have not done so.

And, even if these procedural barriers did not forbid Kacsmaryk from ruling on this case, the Comstock Act’s text does not ban abortion drugs outright. At most, it prevents them from being mailed or from being transported by an “express company” such as FedEx or UPS.

Still, the fact remains that the text of the Comstock Act can be read quite expansively. If a Republican presidential administration wanted to prosecute a pharmacist for mailing mifepristone to a patient or to an abortion clinic, there are plausible legal arguments that such a prosecution is allowed.

The legal questions that will arise if the federal government attempts to bring a prosecution under the Comstock Act may be completely unprecedented. This is a law from another era, when individual rights meant very little, whose abortion provisions have largely laid dormant for decades because Roe v. Wade prohibited it from being enforced against anyone who ships an abortion medication.

It is also a law that is so expansive, and so contrary even to the values that were ascendant in the 1920s and 1930s, that courts for many decades were reluctant to enforce it.

But the Supreme Court has never explicitly declared that its censorious provisions are unconstitutional — it merely applied a narrow definition of “obscenity” to them. And the Supreme Court itself has never embraced the limited reading of the statute announced in decisions like One Package.

So we can’t dismiss the risk that the Comstock Act will once again be embraced by judges who do not understand that Anthony Comstock is a villain.