Comstock Rising: Christian Right Observations

A discussion with the attorney, election integrity advocate, and "Christian Right Observer Weekly" reporter Jenny Cohn.

Jenny Cohn, my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast, is an attorney, election integrity advocate, and political writer whose articles have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Who What Why, The Independent, Salon, and the Bucks County Beacon. She now covers Christian nationalism at her Substack, Christian Right Observer Weekly, or CROW.

Few independent investigative writers have been as stout, as tireless, or as prolific. Her smart, well-researched, and often mind-blowing journalistic nuggets have been an essential component of my Twitter feed for years. It was great to sit down with her and talk shop.

Here are three takeaways from our discussion:

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Christian extremists want to undo the sexual revolution.

Generally, the groups that comprise the religious right want what Leonard Leo has been seeking for decades: no abortions of any kind; no civil rights protections for the LGBTQ community—no gay marriage, no medical access for trans individuals, a return of anti-sodomy laws; and no contraception. Some have even railed against sex for the purpose of pleasure and not procreation.

As political platforms go, “Celibacy Now!” is a big loser. So is banning birth control. But Leo and his cronies control the Supreme Court, which boasts six religious extremists on its nine-person bench. So they will have the last word on this.

But, like, what gives? Why are these Peeping Toms so concerned about what other people are doing in their bedrooms? Their obsession borders on voyeurism. Here is Cohn’s explanation:

I started to realize this really in investigating Project 2025 and the organizations behind it, starting with the lead organization, the one that conceived of it, which is the Heritage Foundation, and their president, Kevin Roberts. I found him on video talking about how he follows the Roman Catholic Church’s teachings on contraception, and the Roman Catholic Church, of course, says that contraception is a sin and you shouldn’t use it, really….He was saying how difficult that can be, and that as Catholics who are involved in politics, they need to use what he called discernment when talking about that type of issue—which I think is sort of a sly way of saying concealment. Like, basically, you don’t have to volunteer your full view on contraception. But he opposes it.

And so that kind of surprised me. And then I saw that the Heritage Foundation actually had even tweeted out that conservatives were leading the charge to end recreational sex and return sex to its original purpose, which is to have children. And that included, you know, not using birth control. So that I thought was kind of interesting, since that’s the lead organization [of Project 2025]. And then there were other very large Christian right juggernauts who are partners of Project 2025 because they pretty much all are who seem to have the same view. So a good example is the Family Research Council, led by Evangelical extremist Tony Perkins. And they had also tweeted out something about contraception being bad, and how it led to the sexual revolution.

These people are very obsessed with sexual revolution, and they want to get rid of it. And they blame the birth control on allowing women to work outside the home and allowing there to be recreational sex, which [has], they say, broken down the marriages and destroyed our society.

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Now that they’ve torpedoed Roe, they are coming for Griswold.

Anthony Comstock, the perfectly named “anti-vice” activist, was a former postal inspector who spent his free time inveighing against fun. His name has been invoked often lately, as “Comstock laws,” most of which date to his late 19th century stint as head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, are once again in the news.

One of these “Comstock laws” banning the use of “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception” was declared unconstitutional in Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 ruling that said the law violated the “right to marital privacy”—something you’d think Clarence Thomas, of all people, would be cool with, but nah.

The Christian extremists really do want to take birth control away, the better to turn women into baby-making machines and increase the domestic infant supply. How will they accomplish that? Cohn explains:

They have multiple modes of attack. One could just be going to the Supreme Court and overturning the Griswold case because that's the case that found a right to privacy in the federal constitution. The Dobbs Court, when it overturned Roe v Wade, largely due to the efforts of Leonard Leo, [decided] that there is no right to privacy after all. That was a mistake. So they could just [overturn it] at the Supreme Court that way.

But then they also have a backup plan—a Plan B, if you will—which is Project 2025. And they’re targeting all of these federal agencies, and one of the ones that they’re very focused on is Health and Human Services, which includes the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA—which approve birth control pills, hormonal birth control.

And they’re already messaging through various Project 2025 organizations, especially Turning Point USA—that’s Charlie Kirk’s group—that birth control is toxic, carcinogenic, terrible for women. They always try to make it [seem] that they’re doing these things to…help women, even if that’s not really the case. So they’re messaging all of this stuff, I believe, in preparation for making the argument that the FDA should withdraw approval of birth control. And if they control Health and Human Services, they can control the levers that can do that.

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Fetal personhood is a thing with the religious extremists.

I was so angry about the notion of blastocysts and embryos having the same, if not more, rights that the pregnant women whose uteruses they are occupying that I wrote about it on Tuesday, right after I recorded the interview with Jenny Cohn, who introduced me to fetal personhood. The whole concept is so inherently misogynistic that it makes my blood boil.

It was Cohn who pointed me to the work of Robert George, a professor at Princeton and FEDSOC guy. From a purely constitutional point of view—which is how Roberts, Alito and company will look at it—the “fetal personhood” argument has more merit than it seems at first blush. (At first blush it seems so preposterous that anyone using the term should be laughed out of the courtroom.) She explains:

I saw an interview of Robert George where he said, “Look, you can say that someone’s not a person unless they have self -awareness, and that therefore an embryo and maybe even a fetus isn’t a person.” He’s like, “But if you make that argument, then the same is true of people who are in a vegetative state.” So he’s thinking this through…

So yeah, they’re trying to close every angle. And I just think that the only way around it is to just vote out Republicans at every level of the ballot, including the judge positions when they're elected positions, and higher up—and certainly the presidency.

The Christian extremists are dedicated to criminalizing 1) abortion, 2) gay sex of any kind, and 3) contraception. They have made this very clear. And the only way to avoid giving power to these weirdos is to not give these weirdos power.

“The last thing we need,” Cohn says, “is more rightwing justices.”

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

S7 E12: Fetal Personhoodwinked: Christian Right Observations (with Jenny Cohn)

Jenny Cohn talks to Greg Olear about her work on election integrity and the Christian right; her new project, the Christian Right Observer Weekly, and the collaboration with researcher Kira Resistance; the influence of Leonard Leo, a fundamentalist Catholic activist, on the Supreme Court; rightwing efforts to make abortion illegal on a federal level, the Christian right's opposition to LGBTQ rights and contraception, and their goal to undo the sexual revolution; the unholy alliance between religious and economic freedom Republicans; and fetal personhood and the right’s coming assault on women’s health. Plus: a little Elvis.

Follow Jenny:
https://twitter.com/jennycohn1

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Photo credit: Seal of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1873. On the left, the purveyor of obscenity is being thrust into a cell; while on the right a Christian layman consigns infamous volumes to the flames.