Wednesday Open Thread

5 thoughts on “Wednesday Open Thread”

1. Well, at least there is SOME honesty among firms of the oil & gas industry.

   A report from a Denver-based environmental group shows that Colorado’s oil and gas industry is trending in the wrong direction on drilling-related spills.

   The Center for Western Priorities’ annual Western Oil and Gas Spills Tracker report counted 473 spills reported by operators to state regulators in 2022, a 16% jump from 2021. It was the second year in a row that that figure has risen, as drillers continue to rebound from the sharp decline in production that followed the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.

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2. What is the Comstock Act? Ian Milhiser at Vox.com

   Really interesting article on Anthony Comstock and the history of anti-sex, anti birth-control and anti abortion.

   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.

   …

   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.

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   1. Interesting that "indecent" in this law includes things "tending to incite arson, murder, or assassination." Seems like a crafty attorney could make a case that some types of commercial or political mailers – not at all related to abortion – might run afoul of indecency laws!

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      1. When reading the broad scope of the Comstock Law, I'm wondering if it could be construed to ban the sale of firearms and ammunition on the web, for delivery by mail or delivery services such as Amazon, FedEx, UPS, and the like?

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         1. “could be construed……..” Probably. That law is so outdated; and Comstock was such a piece of shit, even for his times; that almost anything could be construed from the act.

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