The Comstock Act, an 1873 federal law signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, is a relic of an era when free speech, medical privacy, and other rights that modern-day Americans take for granted effectively did not exist.

Nearly every word of this law, which is named after the Gilded Age anti-sex crusader Anthony Comstock, is unconstitutional -- at least under the understanding of the Constitution that prevailed for nearly all of the past 60 years.