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Another was Samuel Colgate, whose soap manufacturing company became the target of a years-long boycott launched by “freethinkers throughout the country,” according to Comstock biographers Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech.

The case, however, made Comstock’s name synonymous with “prudery, Puritanism and officious meddling,” according to Broun and Leech.

However, “Comstock had no great luck among the so-called abortionists,” Broun and Leech found, achieving a lower percentage of convictions than against accused pornographers.

I do buy used books, and I’ve been married a long time, so I decided to acquit myself of these charges on technical grounds, fending off the journalist Heywood Broun’s remark that “a technical objection is the first refuge of a scoundrel.”

Paul Broun, famous for having described the Big Bang theory and evolution as “lies straight from the pit of hell.”