Their insatiable appetite for apocalypses being unsatisfied by mere fears of a boiling planet and Trumptalitarianism, progressives have conjured a fresh terror: Anthony Comstock, dead now 108 years. His Lazarus-like resurrection will, however, be beneficial if it catalyzes justice for D.M. Bennett, one of Comstock’s casualties.

Born in 1844, Comstock was a fervent Protestant of insufferable rectitude — as a Union infantryman, he theatrically poured on the ground his whiskey allotments. After the war, he settled in New York City, where the fleshpots and sinners lacerated his sensibilities. There newsstands sold a 55-page palm-sized guidebook, the “Gentleman’s Directory,” featuring about 150 of the city’s approximately 500 brothels. His New York Society for the Suppression of Vice provided steady work campaigning against, it said, literature that “consists of books, pamphlets, tracts, leaflets, of pictures engraved on steel and wood, colored and plain, of photographs, cards, and charms, all designed and cunningly calculated to inflame the passions.”

“Lust,” Comstock said, “defiles the body, debauches the imagination, corrupts the mind, deadens the will, destroys the memory, sears the conscience, hardens the heart, and damns the soul.” According to Stanford historian Richard White, in his history of America 1865-1896 (“The Republic for Which It Stands”), “above all Comstock made Americans quail when faced with the specter of the masturbating boy.”

In 1873 (decades before George Bernard Shaw coined the epithet “Comstockery”), Comstock browbeat Congress into passing the Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.

Known then and now as the Comstock Act, it said, and still says: “No obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print, or other publication of a vulgar or an indecent character, or any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion, nor any article or thing intended or adapted for any indecent or immoral use or nature … shall be carried in the mail.”

As a maraschino cherry atop this sundae of (now) unconstitutional aspirations, Congress appointed Comstock a postal inspector. Late in life, he boasted about his law enforcement achievements: 160 tons of literature and 4 million pictures destroyed. And at least 15 people driven to suicide, including a famous abortionist who, after an arrest orchestrated by Comstock, slit her throat in her bathtub.

Historian White says “the numbers are unclear, but contemporaries estimated abortions at one to every five or six live births in the 1850s. A Michigan Board of Health estimate in the 1880s claimed that one-third of all pregnancies ended in an abortion.” Certainly, advertisements for contraceptives and supposed abortion-inducing medications were common, even after a majority of states passed “Little Comstock Laws.”

The Supreme Court has almost completely undone its 1831 decision that the Bill of Rights does not apply to state governments. And many modern decisions protecting and expanding rights — regarding government entanglement with religion, unwanted searches and seizures, entrapment, and privacy — have rendered Comstock’s 151-year-old law as dead as the expired Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

That Congress in the 1990s declined to amend his law is irrelevant to Americans’ freedom of sexual expression, which is (to say no more) robustly exercised. Nevertheless, progressives now cry “aux barricades!” to repeal Comstock’s law. Their overheated fear is that a reelected Donald Trump, who has led a life free from any taint of Comstockery, might wield Comstock’s law to somehow ban abortion. Their anxiety might seem synthetic, but progressives really seem to think we should fear an insufficiency of fear.

Today, the indefatigable and indispensable Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has a better idea. FIRE is seeking a presidential pardon for D.M. Bennett, a Comstock contemporary notorious for his religious skepticism and opposition to marriage. He was convicted of violating the Comstock Act because he mailed another author’s 23-page tract, “Cupid’s Yokes, or The Binding Forces of Conjugal Life,” which contained a few less-than-erotic words such as “semen” and “coition.”

Although President Rutherford B. Hayes had already pardoned the convicted author of “Cupid’s Yokes,” Bennett was sentenced to 13 months at hard labor, punishment that is believed to have shortened his life. A pardon would affirm the nation’s capacity for blushing — its embarrassment about the travesty of the Comstock Act.

Shortly before his death at 71, Comstock was appointed by President Woodrow Wilson U.S. delegate to the International Purity Conference in, wouldn’t you know, San Francisco. There he went to court in an unavailing attempt to prevent window-dressers from leaving unclothed mannequins in department store windows. Comstock lost.

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post. His email address is georgewill@washpost.com.