In the birth-control movement, she
has already begun to fight for her right to have, without legal
interference, all knowledge pertaining to her sex nature. This is the
third and most important of the epoch-making battles for general
liberty upon American soil. It is most important because it is to
purify the very fountain of the race and make the race completely
free.
The first and most dramatic of the three great struggles for liberty
reached its apex, as we know, in the American Revolution. It had for
its object the right to hold such political beliefs as one might
choose, and to act in accordance with those beliefs. If this political
freedom is now lost to us, it is because we did not hold strongly
enough to those liberties fought for by our forefathers.
Nearly a hundred years after the Revolution the battle for religious
liberty came to a climax in the career of Robert G. Ingersoll. His
championship of the much vaunted and little exercised freedom of
religious opinion swept the blasphemy laws into the lumber room of
outworn tyrannies. Those yet remaining upon the statute books are
invoked but rarely, and then the effort to enforce them is ridiculous.
Within a few years the tragic combination of false moral standards and
infamous obscenity laws will be as ridiculous in the public mind as
are the now all but forgotten blasphemy laws.
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