The New Conservative Strategy of Civilian Surveillance and Paid Snitches

First the GOP offered a bounty for "aiding or abetting" abortion. Now it's offering a bounty on the heads of librarians who stock banned books, and bringing back Victorian-era obscenity laws.

Photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash

Abortion rights advocates often make the point that opposition to abortion is less about “life” and more about a forced return to patriarchal authority, harshly enforced traditional gender roles, and male + state control over women’s bodies. There is a lot of evidence for this, from the fact that the same people who say a fertilized egg is the moral equivalent of a human being don’t actually believe their own claims, to the fact that people who claim to care about baby’s lives oppose all sorts of policies that would help those babies once they’re born, to the fact that no major “pro-life” group supports the most effective way to lower the abortion rate (contraception), to the fact that anti-abortion views correlate more strongly with sexist views than just about anything else.

The anti-abortion movement is also inescapably authoritarian, and often a testing ground for the broader authoritarian right. We’ve seen anti-abortion tactics expanded out to anti-gay and anti-trans efforts. And now we’re seeing anti-abortion tactics used to censor books and criminalize librarians.

Some of these new tactics are in fact throw-backs to the very old Comstock Laws, which were used to prosecute Margaret Sanger, arrest librarians in the 1800s, suppress information about contraception and abortion, and ban books including Ulysses, The Canterbury Tales, and Lady Chatterly’s Lover. These laws were the brainchild of postmaster general Anthony Comstock, a puritanical little turd who dedicated his life to punishing anything that transgressed his priggish and prudish idea of morality.

This is the model the anti-abortion movement is following. They’ve dredged up the old Comstock Laws and are using them to try to prevent the dissemination of abortion pills — the exact same strategy, with the exact same justification, that Anthony Comstock parlayed at the end of the 19th century. And of course “obscenity” doesn’t just extend to a woman’s ability to prevent pregnancy, or to get un-pregnant; it extends to any information about sex and sexuality that prissy little fanatics decide is simply too exciting for the public to access.

Enter book bans.

Today, Axios broke the story that the architect of the Texas abortion bounty law — the law that allows anyone in the US to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion in Texas and get a hefty payout for snitching — has drafted a similar law to go after librarians and pull “obscene” books from library shelves. That man, Jonathan Mitchell, has penned “Safe Library Patron Protection” ordinances for ten communities, with at least ten more in the works. From Axios:

• Librarians also may not put on the shelves any book in the young adult section that includes descriptions of nudity, "any type of sexual act between individuals," masturbation, cross-dressing, suicide, self-harm, or "excretory functions."

• The draft ordinance also bars librarians and any other city employees from displaying LGBTQ+ flags or emblems — or "tak[ing] any action that ... acknowledges the month of June or any other period of time as LGBTQ Pride Month."

Say goodbye to “Everybody Poops,” I guess, as well as what seems to be much of the best young adult literature of all time and much of the core curriculum for high schoolers: Speak, The Fault in Our Stars, Catcher in the Rye, Romeo and Juliet (and a whole lot of Shakespeare), Ovid’s Metamorphosis, the Grapes of Wrath, Lord of the Flies, even the Diary of Anne Frank.

But this isn’t just a ban. Like the Texas abortion bounty law, these ordinances also create a private right of action as one penalty for stocking the unabridged Anne Frank in the Young Adult section — in other words, these ordinances allow any random person who walks into a Texas library and sees a Christopher Pike book to sue the library or staff members; it allows any random person to sue any city employee who, say, displays a rainbow flag in their cubicle in the month of June.

Like the Texas abortion bounty law, the payout is significant: $10,000 for snitches who sue, plus their legal costs and attorney’s fees covered.

Attempts to restrict the public from information have, for the entirety of US history, been tied up in attempts to restrict women from exercising any reproductive choice. Opposition to abortion and contraception have always been tied up not just in misogyny — although definitely in misogyny — but in authoritarian prudery, a kind of patriarchal moralizing that says people cannot be trusted to have information about sex and sexuality. I honestly thought that the Comstock era was pretty well over, and that the American public — and even the religious right — wouldn’t be so foolish as to go back 150 years to ban books deemed “obscene” because they mention the curve of a breast or the delights of illicit sex.

But here we are. As Republicans ensure that abortion bans penned in the 1800s now apply to the public in 2023, so too are Republicans trying to bring back obscenity regulations from the Victorian era. But this time, they’re laying on a very modern enforcement mechanism: The lawsuit.

It’s also worth noting here that the impulse is to punish, and harshly, people who are very necessary to the functioning of a healthy, pluralistic society: Doctors (in the case of abortion) and librarians (in the case of book bans). Doctors and librarians are trusted professionals who the public often has greater confidence in than politicians; authoritarians know that to control the population, you have to be able to control those the people trust. And they know it would be wildly unpopular to arrest 12-year-old Olivia for checking out a naughty book, or 25-year-old Madison for seeking an abortion. So they target trusted authority figures — they intimidate them, they threaten them, they make them small.

If you’re getting this newsletter to your inbox, you probably support abortion rights. But if you got here some other way, maybe you don’t. Here is what I would ask you to consider: What kind of society do you want to live in?

Do you want to live in a society that offers its citizens extensive freedoms, even if that sometimes means that information will be out there that you don’t like, or find troubling? Or do you prefer a society not just with tight government oversight over what information people have access to (and ask yourself: do you trust that whatever government is in power will always align with your interests?), but that enlists a vast civilian surveillance network, and rewards people for filing lawsuits against their neighbors and community members?

Civilian surveillance can be highly effective — that’s why it was leveraged by the Stasi in East Germany, and the KGB in communist-era Russia. The question is whether those are societies and law enforcement mechanisms we want to emulate.

It is impossible to strip authoritarianism out from anti-abortion laws. It is fundamentally authoritarian for the government to dictate what happens within a woman’s uterus; it is fundamentally authoritarian for the government to legally mandate that a woman endure a potentially life-threatening and universally health-compromising state for 10 months of her life, and then undergo one of the most physically painful ordeals human beings experience.

Pregnancy and childbirth are, even in the best cases, events that radically and permanently alter a person’s body and fundamentally change their life. This is true even if the child is placed for adoption; it is true even if the pregnancy is easy and the birth uncomplicated. There is no other scenario in which we mandate that people use their internal organs in the service of others, let alone for months at a time; there is no other scenario in which we mandate that people permanently alter their bodies. Even if having a baby doesn’t result in injury or disability — although to be clear, a majority of mothers do experience pain and injuries that persist long after giving birth — childbearing always leaves its mark on the body, the psyche, and the heart. Entered into willingly, this can be a gorgeous kind of sacrifice, a transformative giving. Entered into forcibly, though? It’s impossible to compare, because we don’t force anything similar in any other context. We don’t force parents to donate a kidney if their child’s is failing. We don’t take the organs of a corpse, even to save a dozen other lives, without the previous consent of the dead person, or the consent of their family.

Many of the burdens we put on pregnant women would be socially impermissible, not to be mention on-their-face illegal, if put on anyone else.

That inherent anti-abortion authoritarianism is only widening out. It has worked, and so they are getting more aggressive. It’s moving beyond abortion and contraception, into regulating free expression and banning books. And this right-wing authoritarianism is getting more creative, and leveraging novel legal mechanisms to ensure that no one ever feels totally safe or free or un-watched. It’s building a civilian surveillance network, and offering generous payouts to people who snitch on their friends and neighbors.

Whatever you think of abortion or teenagers reading naughty books, it’s worth asking: Is this how you want to live?

xx Jill