What are you talking about, black people can vote, gay people can marry, but there has hardly been any freedom of speech progress since 1800?
I think the ripple effects from being raised to believe sexuality and nudity are shameful or obscene are much greater than we appreciate.
Amazing mental gymnastics.
No, they are specifically saying that expression has improved because the improvements in women's rights are more important than the restrictions or regression of nudity. There is simply no dichotomy there. In fact saying that it is "more important" suggests that restrictions in nudity is also a factor. Again, not a dichotomy.
> The implication is that you either admit expression is better because we have women's rights or you admit you were wrong.
No, you can acknowledge that we have women's rights and still think we have regressed. But for that to be true you would have to argue what is more important than the improvements in women's rights. Otherwise you would be the one making a false dichotomy by claiming that things can't have improved because one thing hasn't.
So, the views of the community have evolved since then and people no longer consider calls for divorce to be obscene. Therefore, the government is not allowed to censor them.
However, no changes have been made to the legal framework. You can easily fall back into Comstockery if the public overwhelmingly decides that such a thing is obscene. The Miller test is not something to be proud of as the safeguard of freedom of expression especially when you consider the current context: people finding discussions of safe prostitution to be obscene. Compare that to the protections offered to people calling for genocide (of Jews, of Muslims, of Atheists, of blacks, etc.) and it is rather perplexing.
Edit: You seem to have a problem with the quotes, so I changed them to italics.
I’m not sure what your thought exercise about putting quotes around words is supposed to prove; feel free to read, say, the Wikipedia article on the subject.
Also, are you seriously saying that my example isn’t a case of community norms?
They are both important topics and there can be often overlaps but they are ultimately different topics.
Some freedoms that quickly come to mind:
the right NOT to have sex (rape within marriage, or of slaves, was legal. Other rape laws were largely unenforced)
gay sex, interracial marriage (and sex), sex among teenagers
Access to pornography is legal, and vastly easier due to technical reasons than in the past.
Women have been recognised as sexual beings equal to men, and their pleasure is no longer ignored.
The possibility to have sex and not get pregnant arose and became easier. So did abortion.
Norms around age of consent were lowered.
Specifically for prostitution: It's a point of heated debate in the feminist community if the liberalisation in, for example, some European countries actually led to better working conditions and less human trafficking.
That's why that community, which advocated for legalisation in the past, is now split on the subject. It's just not clear if legalisation was successful.
Huh? I'd say "raised".
Bills like this are always bipartisan yet despised by the public.
That happened like in the past few years, which is a tiny fraction of the past 2 centuries. And if extremist Republicans get to rule the government for another decade (whether directly or with the help of "moderate Democrats"), then I don't know if that will last either.