Age Verification for Porn Sites is Constitutional—and Necessary

Porn companies do nothing to shield our children from their explicit and obscene content, which is increasingly violent and barbaric. That may finally change, thanks to Texas’s new age-verification law for porn sites, H.B. 1181, and the recent Fifth Circuit opinion in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton upholding it.

Inspired by the example of Louisiana, seven states, Texas among them, have adopted legislation in the last two years to restrict minors’ access to obscenity on the Web. Perhaps as many as a dozen more states will follow suit in 2024. After years of legislative inaction, this is the first serious effort to block American kids from accessing porn sites since the Supreme Court struck down the federal Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA) in Ashcroft v. ACLU (2002).

And it’s about time. Parents need help. The effortless availability of pornography in every home in America today would have been inconceivable 20 years ago when only adult bookstores or similar venues sold such materials, which, thanks to zoning and age requirements, were inaccessible to children.

In a shocking transformation within the last decade, today’s youth have at their fingertips infinite pornographic content, 24/7. The smartphone has made explicit sexual imagery endemic, private, and a click away. Kids don’t even have to go looking for it; social media are often the first entry point to pornographic sites.

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