Photograph Source: Sir Morosus – CC BY 4.0

The moralistic Christian right have achieved significant political power through Donald Trump’s presidency, the Republican control of both Houses of Congress, and a conservative majority of Judges on the Supreme Court. Together, they are promoting a new, second-round of the modern porn wars that, like the earlier round that lasted from the mid-1940s thru mid-50s, focuses on the censorship of alleged porn targeted toward adolescent or “minor” youths.

During the period of 1947 to ’49, more than one hundred cities across the country, big and small, passed laws or ordinances to ban the display or sale of comic books. Comic book campaigns took place in Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles as well as in Baltimore, Cleveland, Hartford, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, New Orleans and Sacramento and in Ann Arbor (MI), Coral Gables (FL), Falls Church (VA), Hillsdale (MI), Mt. Prospect (IL) and Nashua (NH).

Efforts to censor comics were probably the most contentious in New York State because a good number of the publishers operated out of Gotham. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Winters vs. New York, struck down as unconstitutional a state law prohibiting the publication and/or distribution of material “principally made up of criminal news, police reports, or accounts of criminal deeds, or pictures, or stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust or crime.”

In ’48, book burnings took place in New York, West Virginia and Illinois. In October, students at the Spencer Graded School, in the small town of Spencer, WV, encouraged by parents, teachers and religious leaders, collected a 6-ft pile of comic books and set them ablaze in the school yard. With an irony lost on no one, a Superman comic was first ignited and then used to set the pile afire.

In late-53, the U.S. Senate established a special subcommittee to investigate juvenile delinquency. As part of its........

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