Supreme Court to Weigh In on Texas’ Porn Site Age Verification Law
By Movieguide® Contributor
The Supreme Court agreed last Tuesday to hear a case surrounding a new Texas law requiring age verification for users to access porn sites.
The law, known as H.B. 1181, would require users to provide personal information before visiting sites featuring adult content.
The battle regarding this new regulation has been ongoing since last year. The bill was first signed by Governor Greg Abbott in June 2023. Then in September, pro-adult entertainment group The Free Speech Coalition filed a lawsuit against it, stating it violates “free speech.” NBC News reported, “The challengers argue that the 2023 law violates the Constitution’s First Amendment by requiring anyone using the platforms in question, including adults, to submit personal information.”
Movieguide® previously reported, “Pornhub claims 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’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors.’”
However, the purpose of the law is to protect minors from viewing harmful adult content, and because of the age verification requirement, PornHub was disabled in Texas earlier this year.
Texas senator Angela Paxton, who sponsored the bill, said, “My bill created an age verification requirement for online pornography websites in Texas to protect minors from accessing their harmful content.”
In March, an attempt was made to block the law. “A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled 2-1 in favor of the age verification law, overturning a lower court decision that blocked its enforcement,” Christian Post said. “’Applying rational-basis review, the age-verification requirement is rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in preventing minors’ access to pornography,’ wrote Circuit Judge Jerry E. Smith, a Reagan appointee, for the majority.”
The case will be considered during the Supreme Court’s next term, which runs from October of this year until next June.
Movieguide® previously reported on the dangers of pornography:
As porn becomes more accessible, parents can protect their children from its detrimental effects by understanding the long-term consequences and protecting their children through parental control settings.
The Wall Street Journal explains that “younger people’s brains are more wired for pleasure than adults, with higher spikes of the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine released in anticipation of enjoyable activities.”
While many young people return to porn for this reason, Movieguide® often discusses its life-altering effects on children and teens…
Porn elicits the same brain reactions that drugs produce for a drug addict. Valerie Voon, a psychiatry professor at the University of Cambridge, found that when her team showed porn to young men with compulsive porn habits, their brain scans mirrored the brain scans of drug addicts when shown pictures of drugs.
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