The last-named business succeeded as it always does in this country,
where the judiciary is quite as sensitive to the suspicion of sinfulness
as the legislative arm. A glance at the decisions handed down during the
forty years of Comstock's chief activity shows a truly amazing
willingness to accommodate him in his pious enterprises. On the one
hand, there was gradually built up a court-made definition of obscenity
which eventually embraced almost every conceivable violation of Puritan
prudery, and on the other hand the victim's means of defence were
steadily restricted and conditioned, until in the end he had scarcely
any at all. This is the state of the law today. It is held in the
leading cases that anything is obscene which may excite "impure
thoughts" in "the minds ... of persons that are susceptible to impure
thoughts,"[55] or which "tends to deprave the minds" of any who, because
they are "young and inexperienced," are "open to such
influences"[56]--in brief, that anything is obscene that is not fit to
be handed to a child just learning to read, or that may imaginably
stimulate the lubricity of the most foul-minded.
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