U.S. Supreme Court Sides with Texas

By Gregg Wendorf
Advance News Journal

This past April, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Texas and other such minded states can enforce age-verification requirements for porn sites. In doing so, the Court rejected arguments from the adult-entertainment industry that its First Amendment Rights were being violated.

Eight other states now have the same law in place, including the most recent addition, Florida.

Not Your Old Porn

For Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and ’64, Playboy was once at the top of the list for some adolescent teens. Bare chests and provocative poses were spread out across the pages, and each issue usually had three layouts, including the centerfold.

Then, in 1969, Penthouse appeared on some store shelves, and for the first time, female pubic hair was included in the photos.

Five years later, Hustler and Larry Flynt appeared on the scene, shaking up things by including female genitalia in the photo layouts. Four years after that, he survived an assassination attempt, which kept him wheelchair bound until his death in 2021 at the age of 78.

With Hustler, though, came the raunch, and it was downhill from there, with more and more parents’ groups denouncing pornography in general, with the porn industry still stuck safely behind the Free Speech Amendment (the First).

All during that period, however, a teen age 14, for example, couldn’t walk into a store and buy Penthouse, Playboy, or Hustler without a photo ID to prove they were at least 18.

When porn VHS came on the scene at video stores, either in a separate room or under the front counter, it was still the same protocol: photo ID to verify age, 18 and older.

Then the web came about, high-speed internet, and before anyone could say “what just happened?” anyone with a smart phone, regardless of age, could access multiple porn sites, all open to any user, regardless of age.

Sites like Pornhub, XVideos, both of which were typically included in any national ranking of most visited porn sites, were drawing in more than 1 billion visitors a month, with no one paying attention to age.

New Texas Law

Last year, Texas passed a law — any porn site offering adult content must first identify the age of the user.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 earlier this year that the new Texas anti-porn law was indeed constitutional.

In issuing its ruling, the appellate court wrote: “The record is replete with examples of the sort of damage that access to pornography does to children.”

A trade group representing the adult-entertainment industry, backed by the ACLU, countered with this statement: “Americans hold a wide range of views about sexual content online. Some view it as offensive or indecent; for others, it is artistic, informative, or even essential to important parts of life.”

Come on. That’s not what these sites are about. When I knew this law might take effect, I checked them out because I wasn’t going to sign in after the law was passed and turn over my photo ID to the site.

Picture, for example, a young woman with five guys. That’s “artistic?”

Sure, they have your standard pornography, which was the kind shown in actual movie theaters back in the 1970s and ‘80s. However, they also have the sort of porn that in my humble opinion borders on the warped and demented, showing women in horrible, degrading positions; men, too, without getting too descriptive.

Do we really want our pre-pubescent kids, grandkids accessing this stuff?

“Johnny just started fifth grade this year, but he’s sure in his bedroom a lot with his iPad.”

Just looking at the categories on these sites, you shake your head and think, no way is that possible.

Then, you think, that all of this content for at least the past, what, 15 to 20 years, has been easily accessible to the youth in Texas. Free. With ads.

The adult industry says that there are ways to keep this content from minors. There are filters available, etc. As if, every parent has the time to check all of the digital devices in and around the home and ensure that the filters are in place to block kids from online porn? Seriously?

Sure, some parents do that; but I’m guessing that a whole lot do not.

So, for once, as much as I harangue Gov. Abbott for the weird stuff he does, and Texas AG Ken Paxton, with his wife and alleged mistress in the spotlight, and the GOP that controls the state legislature, I’ll give credit where credit is due; and in this case, passing this new porn-related law last year, I say, job well done.

If you try and access the porn sites today, the following message is what you get from most of them on their home screen. Some still offer content, but you have to offer up some proof of age, which means someone out there in the porn industry will now have access to some of your personal data, photo ID, so good luck with that:

From the Porn Sites:

As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website.

Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, 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.

While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online, and in fact, will put minors and your privacy at risk.

Attempting to mandate age verification without any means to enforce at scale gives platforms the choice to comply or not, leaving hundreds of thousands of websites open and accessible.

As we've seen in other states, such bills have failed to protect minors, by driving users from those few websites which comply, to the hundreds of thousands of websites with far fewer safety measures in place, which do not comply. Very few sites are able to compare to the robust Trust and Safety measures we currently have in place. To protect minors and user privacy, any legislation must be enforced against all platforms offering adult content.

Unfortunately, the Texas law for age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Not only will it not actually protect children, but it will also inevitably reduce content creators’ ability to post and distribute legal adult content and directly impact their ability to share the artistic messages they want to convey with it.

The safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. We believe that the only effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to verify users’ age on their device and to either deny or allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that verification.

We call on all adult sites to comply with the law. Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas. In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users.

Final note: Companies violating the age verification requirements required by HB 1181 will be subject to fines of up to $10,000 per day, and an additional $10,000 per day if the corporation illegally retains identifying information. Also, if a child is exposed to pornographic content due to not properly verifying a user’s age, the website’s owners may be hit with a penalty of $250K per child.