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Is It Legal to Limit Access to Porn?

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Is It Legal to Limit Access to Porn?

By Movieguide® Contributor

The Supreme Court is weighing if a pornography age-verification law in Texas is Constitutional, but after preliminary hearings, the justices are split on their opinions.

The Texas law in question requires pornography distribution websites, like Pornhub, to put age-verification systems into place to ensure that minors cannot access their content. The law is just one of 19 passed at a state level in recent years meant to stem the tide of child and teen exposure and addiction to porn. As with all 19 of these laws, Pornhub has protested Texas’ age-verification requirement, calling it a violation of the First Amendment.

“[The law] impinge[s] on the rights of adults to access protected speech, [and] it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’ stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors,” Pornhub wrote after the law was passed last March.

Since then, Pornhub has chosen to completely disable access for anyone living in Texas  as has been its response in every state with age-verification laws — rather than requiring users to confirm their age. While the company claims this is done in protest, it is more likely done so the loss in users that would occur from age verification does not become known. However, internal documents from the site reveal Pornhub loses 50% or more of its traffic when requiring age verification.

Now that age-verification laws have passed in 19 states, the company has brought its arguments to the Supreme Court rather than lose its business. The justices, however, have been split in their response. Liberal-leaning justice Sonia Sotomayor is siding with the porn distributors questioning if these laws could withstand a strict evaluation of their compliance with the First Amendment. Meanwhile, conservative-leaning justice Amy Coney Barrett argues that laws like this are necessary to protect our children from content they are not supposed to be seeing.

“Kids can get online porn through gaming systems, tablets, phones, computers,” she said, per Faithwire. “Let me just say that content filtering for all those different devices — I can say from personal experience — is difficult to keep up with. And I think that the explosion of addiction to online porn that has shown that content filtering isn’t working.”

Barrett is absolutely right, as, when it comes to pornography, lawmakers have failed to keep up with the times before the passing of these laws. They are now attempting to correct their mistakes after allowing pornography distributors to target minors for decades.

As Movieguide® ‘s founder Dr. Baehr notes in Culture-Wise Family, “in 1948 there was an ‘incident of impotence of only 0.4% of the males under 25, and less than 1% of males under 35 years of age.’ By 1970, almost all ‘of the male population experienced impotence at some time.’”

Even with the rates of incidental exposure exploding in the ’60s and ’70s, it’s taken until now for lawmakers to make serious changes to protect the population from this unwanted targeting. According to the American Psychological Foundation, the average age of first exposure to porn in the U.S. is 13, with some being exposed as early as 5 years old.

Hopefully, the Supreme Court justices will understand that age-verification laws are the first of many steps to turn back the tide and bring incidental exposure rates to porn back to where they were in the ’40s and ’50s. While it will take much work, these 19 states have taken the first step to fight this epidemic that is ravaging the country.

READ MORE: HOW PORN IS DAMAGING THE NEXT GENERATION


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