This new one-hour HD (High Definition) video chronicles the life of D.M. Bennett, the nineteenth century’s most controversial publisher and American free-speech martyr. Produced by Roderick Bradford in association with Inquiry Media Productions (2009).
The video will be released shortly. Production funded by a grant from the James Hervey Johnson Charitable Educational Trust.
D.M. Bennett (1818–1882) challenged the Comstock Law, named after Anthony Comstock, the chief vice-hunter and crusading moralist for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a Christian sponsored organization that promoted social purity. A religious fanatic, Comstock targeted freethinking liberals and bragged of driving fifteen persons to suicide. Bennett was convicted for defiantly selling the “obscene” free-love pamphlet Cupid’s Yokes. While Bennett awaited transfer to the Albany Penitentiary to serve out his 13-month prison sentence at hard labor, his fellow freethinker and Vice President of the National Liberal League (devoted to complete separation of church and state), Robert Ingersoll—“The Great Agnostic”—worked tirelessly to seek a presidential pardon for the elderly publisher of the “blasphemous” New York City periodical The Truth Seeker.
Following his release from prison for violating the Comstock Laws, supporters sent atheist publisher and activist D. M. Bennett traveling around the world.. His journeys, documented from his own substantial writings, show Bennett's stature among freethinkers and reformers worldwide.
After Bennett's death in 1882, supporters sought to inter — and memorialize — him in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, the final resting place of many of the most distinguished and notorious nineteenth century Americans. Religious conservatives objected, and controversy followed.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
Renew your FREE INQUIRY subscription