{"id":41981,"date":"2026-07-24T16:30:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T14:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kaizen-blog.org\/?p=41981"},"modified":"2026-07-24T16:45:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T14:45:16","slug":"die-recherche-im-wahnsinn-sie-nennen-sich-verteidiger-der-freiheit-und-holen-ein-sittengesetz-von-1873-aus-dem-grab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kaizen-blog.org\/en\/die-recherche-im-wahnsinn-sie-nennen-sich-verteidiger-der-freiheit-und-holen-ein-sittengesetz-von-1873-aus-dem-grab\/","title":{"rendered":"The Investigation Gone Mad: They Call Themselves Defenders of Freedom - and They're Digging Up a Morality Law from 1873"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the annual Alliance Defending Freedom summit in San Diego, the speaker was introduced with a single sentence that made everything else almost unnecessary. Before he ever ran for Congress, Speaker Johnson was one of us, the audience was told. Mike Johnson, second in line to the presidency of the United States, immediately returned the affection. The ADF, he said, feels like home to them. They are like family. The man who decides which bills are even allowed to come to a vote in the House of Representatives calls an extreme far-right Christian nationalist organization his home - an organization whose business is reshaping the law to fit its own ideology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"From Nero to Newsom, Jesus reigns. And the gates of hell shall not prevail against His Church.\"<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

During her roughly 25-minute speech at the ADF Summit 2026, Allie Beth Stuckey, who appears under the brand Conservative Millennial as a conservative podcaster, author, and political commentator, called on Christians to stand boldly for the truth - no matter what price they have to pay.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The family has known him for more than 20 years. The organization hired him in 2002, and shortly afterward he opened its office in northern Louisiana. So much of what they do, Johnson said about himself and his wife, was learned on the front lines of the culture war, keeping the door open for spreading the Gospel, and that still shapes the way he does his job today. Pay close attention to what he's describing here. He is not saying his convictions shaped him. He is saying a Christian nationalist legal lobby did - and what he learned there is now being applied to the lawmaking process of a country with 340 million people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At one point, he left something out, and that omission says more than anything else. Their motto once read in full that they wanted to keep the door open for spreading the Gospel by reshaping the legal system. That second half disappeared sometime during Johnson's years there. A movement does not remove its objective from paper because it has abandoned it. It removes it because saying it out loud is no longer necessary once the transformation is already underway. A burglar doesn't hang a sign on the door.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How far that transformation has progressed can be measured by the case law. The Supreme Court's decisions over the past two decades read like a greatest-hits list for this Christian nationalist legal lobby. Hobby Lobby undermined access to contraception. Masterpiece Cakeshop weakened protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation. Dobbs allowed states to ban abortion. Skrmetti allowed them to prohibit gender-affirming care for minors. A group that once occupied the farthest edge of the American right and was founded as a counterweight to the ACLU has effectively dictated its agenda to the highest court in the country. What is especially striking is what some of these cases were built on. Time and again, the Court was presented with lawsuits over harms that had never actually occurred - imagined grievances brought by people to whom no one had done anything. The highest court in the United States heard cases that would never have existed without this organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What happened this week shows that they no longer need to rely on the courts alone. On July 15, Senator Ted Cruz asked Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche during his confirmation hearing whether he intended to overturn a legal opinion issued in 2022. That opinion concluded that federal law does not prohibit the mailing of certain medications used for abortion when the sender has no knowledge that they will be used unlawfully. The law in question is the Comstock Act, passed in 1873 and signed by President Ulysses S. Grant - back when Bavaria was still a kingdom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Its namesake deserves a closer look, because without him the absurdity of this story is impossible to understand. Anthony Comstock was a Christian crusader who saw human sexuality as a mortal threat to the United States and concluded that the postal service had to save the nation from it. He turned the mail into an instrument of moral policing, banning anything he considered obscene - writings about sexuality, as well as anything related to contraception or abortion. One man believed a republic could be saved from collapse by reading its citizens' mail. For more than a century, his work was treated as a museum piece, something legal historians could shake their heads at with amusement. The ADF brought it back to life, and so far it alone has managed to persuade two Supreme Court justices to openly consider applying it in modern America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where the most disturbing thought of the entire story emerges. A law book is not a graveyard - it is a warehouse. A law that is no longer enforced is not dead. It is asleep, and anyone who knows where to find it can wake it up. The comforting belief that societies move forward and leave outdated laws behind assumes that someone actually leaves them behind. As long as those laws remain on the books, all it takes is a single attorney general to turn the clock back more than 150 years without a single word from Congress. Seen this way, progress is not a permanent condition. It is an agreement, and agreements can be canceled. During his hearing, Blanche already announced that he intends to review the existing legal opinion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mike Johnson, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, vows for the digital virginity of the West<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

How deeply this mindset runs does not have to be inferred from congressional hearings. Johnson has described it himself. He and his son monitor each other through a program called Covenant Eyes, which sends an alert whenever either of them spends too much time looking at something considered sexually inappropriate. The father reviews the son's browsing history, the son reviews the father's, and in the language of evangelical tech culture, this is called an accountability partnership. The Inquisition has simply moved into your pocket - Calvinism with Wi-Fi, surveillance as a family subscription plan. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where the circle closes with Comstock, because both are built on the same assumption. Human beings cannot be trusted to resist temptation, so someone else has to keep watch. Comstock opened people's mail. Johnson lets the browser report back. Between them lie 150 years of technological progress and not a single new idea. Someone who does not trust his own child to be alone with a screen is unlikely to trust 340 million adults to be alone with their own conscience. The organization supplies the legal cases, the Speaker controls the legislative agenda, and for everyday use there is an app.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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No one should dismiss what this means in practice as merely an abstract legal debate among experts. In the states that banned abortion after Dobbs, medication now reaches women almost exclusively through the mail. Anyone who lives far from a clinic, has no car, or cannot afford to travel depends on that option. If the Justice Department declares mailing those medications illegal, what disappears is not simply a product, but the last remaining option for people who already have the least. The people standing before a judge would be those whose only offense was placing an envelope in the mail. That the organization is marching in lockstep with the government is no coincidence. Both are working toward the same goal - turning control over one's own body into a decision made by someone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n