Every member of Congress gets porn in the mail monthly. Some members have tried to stop it but haven’t been able to do so legally.

Larry Flynt has sent his monthly magazine, Hustler, to every member of Congress since 1983, The National Journal reports. “The dirty mag comes in a plain manila envelope, fairly undetectable to the poor intern or staffer tasked with opening the mail,” Matt Vasilogambros of the Journal writes. “And every month, there it is: Hustler, featuring dozens of naked or scantly dressed women, vulgar comics, and articles, some satirical, on politics, society, and sex.”

In 1984, 264 congressional offices complained about receiving the magazine, which led the U.S. Postal Service to ask the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to block the mailings. But the court ruled in favor of Flynt, who argued that it was a First Amendment right to express his political and social views to public officials.

The court wrote:

Even with regard to an order confined to Hustler, the interests of Members of Congress still cannot outweigh defendants’ First Amendment rights not only to communicate and express their views but also to petition Members of Congress. As we have discussed above, the right to be let alone provides a Member of Congress only limited refuge in the office. Furthermore, receiving Hustler once each month would not unduly burden a Member of Congress. Members are not forced to read the magazine or other of the mail they receive in volume.

The only difference between receiving Hustler versus any other content in the mail, from the court’s point of view, is that some members of congress find the magazine offensive, and that is not a sufficient reason to restrict Flynt’s First Amendment rights.

“Plaintiff has shown no substantial governmental interest to justify a ban on Hustler,” the court wrote. “Shielding individual Senators and Representatives from potential injury to their tastes and aesthetic sensibilities is not enough to support the content-based restriction requested here.”

So 30 years later,  every member still gets a free copy of the magazine. “Moses freed the Jews, Lincoln freed the slaves, and I just wanted to free all the neurotics,” Flynt told The Hill in 2011.

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