Comstock’s Revenge: Project 2025
“Project 2025” is the ultra-conservative Heritage Society’s blueprint for what a Republican presidential administration, a Trump presidency, could look like. Its goal is to turn the historic clock back and return the U.S. to the good old days of the Comstock era.
The social and economic changes that followed the Civil War were traumatic and far-reaching. In the face of these challenges, a powerful movement emerged that attempted to contain the forces that were perceived as threatening moral order. It railed against vice in every form, be it alcohol consumption, gambling, prostitution, birth control or obscenity in literature and the arts.
The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the Women’s Christian Temperance Alliance (WCTA), among others, championed this movement. Its national leader was the ever-upstanding Anthony Comstock (1844-1915). So influential was this former dry-goods salesman that George Bernard Shaw coined the term “Comstockery” to denote overzealous moralistic officials.
In 1868, just three years after the end of the Civil War, the movement secured its first major victory when the New York State legislature passed an incredibly broad law to suppress what was described as “obscene” materials. The law defined obscene to include all materials and devices that dealt with conception, birth control and other sexual matters, be they medical or erotic.
Five years later, the movement was strong enough to have the U.S. Congress enact what became popularly known as the Comstock law (1873), legislation that stands as the most sweeping, omnibus anti-obscenity law in American history. The law, in effect, extended New York State prohibitions to all interstate commerce and communications.
The law was so effective that within the first six months of passage, Comstock boasted that it led to the seizure of 194,000 pictures and photographs, 14,200 stereopticon plates and 134,000 pounds of books and other media. In the 1910s near the end of his life, Comstock claimed that he had destroyed 3,984,063 photographs and 160 tons of “obscene” literature.
A century-and-a-half later, the goal of Heritage’s “Project 2025” is very clear – to impose Comstock-era morality once again on all Americans. This morality is anchored in the traditional nuclear family. It insists, “Families [are] comprised of a married mother, father, and their children [and] are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.” (p. 451)
Going further, it argues: “It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.” (p. 4).
It outlines the goal of a new Republican administration:
“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation and piece of legislation that exists.” (p. 4)
It insists:
“The Left does not believe that all men are created equal—they think they are special. They certainly don’t think all people have an unalienable right to pursue the good life. They think only they themselves have such a right along with a moral responsibility to make decisions for everyone else. They don’t think any citizen, state, business, church or charity should be allowed any freedom until they first bend the knee. (p. 16)”
Following in Comstock’s footsteps, it singles out – but never defines — “pornography”:
“Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. (p. 6)”
It makes the following unsubstantiated claim:
“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. (p. 6)”
It calls for the following actions with regard to transgender people:
“Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists; (p. 8)
“The CMS [Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services] could not issue a National Coverage Determination (NCD) regarding “gender reassignment surgery” for Medicare beneficiaries. (p. 474)”
“Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended. (p.104)”
“Project 2025” is most troubled by a woman’s right to control her pregnancy.
“In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion,” it states. (p. 6)”
It adds, “Alternative options to abortion, especially adoption, should receive federal and state support.”
It then reports:
“Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS [Health & Human Services] should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. (p. 455)”
The report acknowledges that “there are roughly 400,000 children across the nation on the waiting list for foster care and 100,000 awaiting adoptive families ….” To address this problem, it calls for the repeal of “the unnecessary 2016 regulation that imposes nonstatutory sexual orientation and gender identity nondiscrimination conditions on agency grants and return to the policy of maximizing the options for placing vulnerable children.” (pp. 477-78). How this will “maximize” adoption options is not specified.
It seeks to reverse policies that have sought to curtail sex discrimination. “The Biden Administration, LGBT advocates, and some federal courts have attempted to expand the scope and definition of sex discrimination, based in part on the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County,” it states. (p. 584).
Going further, it insists:
“The President should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc.”
Donald Trump has sought to distance his presidential candidacy from the “Project 2025,” claiming he knows “nothing” about it.
In its place, he has issued “Agenda 47,” a collection of formal policy plans many of which would rely on executive orders and significantly expanded executive power. They include:
+ Passing legislation establishing that male and female are the only genders recognized by the U.S. and are assigned at birth.
+ A call to end gender affirming care for minors.
+ Empowering the Department of Justice to investigate pharmaceutical companies and hospitals that are “deliberately covered up horrific long-term side-effects of ‘sex transitions’ to get rich at the expense of vulnerable patients.”
Now, a century-and-a-half after Comstock’s anti-obscenity law was adopted and most of its repressive requirements overturned by Supreme Court decisions, Trump, the Heritage Society and others of the deeply reactionary Christian nationalist movement are call for it to be reimposed on all Americans.
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