by Nat Hentoff

About the author: Nat Hentoff writes a civil liberties column for the Village Voice weekly newspaper in New York City and is the author of Free Speech for Me—But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.

For almost 50 years, Anthony Comstock—until he died in 1915—was the nation’s relentless chief censor. He made it a crime to send information through the mail about contraception and abortion, along with anything “obscene.” And, as Edward de Grazia notes in Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius: “Comstock claimed to have convicted ‘enough persons [of obscenity] to fill a passenger train of sixty-one coaches— sixty coaches containing sixty passengers each and the sixty-first coach not...