Big Porn is a $100 billion-a-year global business that many "experts" and spineless combover conservatives said was too big deflate with mere state-level legislation, since Congress had no interest in that gritty culture war issue.
Fortunately, red state legislators didn’t listen to the "Con. Inc." siren song of defeat and they got busy taking on Big Porn.
Currently, 22 states in the United States have imposed age verification laws to deny minors access to online porn.
Big Porn has been fighting these laws in court and losing.
The latest involves Texas.
Fox News reports "The Supreme Court of the United States on Friday upheld a Texas law requiring pornography websites to verify visitors' ages to protect minors from sexually explicit content online.
"Justices ruled 6-3 that requiring adults in Texas to verify their age does not violate the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, noting at least 21 other states imposed similar regulations on sexual material that could be harmful to minors online.
"Texas and other states prohibit the distribution of sexually explicit content to children in brick-and-mortar stores, but online content remains largely unregulated."
We wrote previosuly that, "Pornhub parent company Aylo has noted that it publicly supported age verification for 'years' but added, 'the way many jurisdictions worldwide have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous'."
Which leads us to ask, if the saints at Pornhub have supported age verification "for years" then what’s the holdup? Why did it take legislation to make it happen?
We think you know the answer to that.
And instead of welcoming the age verification Pornhub has supported for "years," when a state enacts this type of law Pornhub in age verification states simply pulls the plug on everyone in the state.
Which sounds like a win-win to us.
And the Texas law has real teeth. "If website owners knowingly violate the law, the Supreme Court ruled the Texas attorney general can sue and collect a civil penalty of up to $10,000 per day that the site is non-compliant.
"They can also collect an additional penalty of up to $250,000 if any minors accessed the covered sexual material as a result of the violation."
We'd like once again to give credit where credit is due. State Rep. Laurie Schlegel, R-La., Dist. 82, started the age verification ball rolling in .
She introduced the first age verification law in June 2022.
At that time Politico observed, "A Simple Law Is Doing the Impossible. It’s Making the Online Porn Industry Retreat."
And now the retreat, thanks to Rep. Schlegel, is looking like Napoleon pulling back from Moscow.
Big Porn claims they oppose these laws because of privacy and online security concerns, but that’s another in a long list of public relations lies.
As one of the porn purveyors told Politico, "age-verification laws make traffic to porn sites drop precipitously. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that nobody wants to upload their driver’s license or passport before watching porn . . . "
That’s the real reason porn pushers oppose the law, not some spurious concern about "privacy."
They're only concerned with privates.
Michael Reagan, the eldest son of President Ronald Reagan, is a Newsmax TV analyst. A syndicated columnist and author, he chairs The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Mr. Reagan is an in-demand speaker with Premiere Speaker's Bureau. Read Michael Reagan's Reports — More Here.
Michael R. Shannon is a commentator, researcher for the League of American Voters, and an award-winning political and advertising consultant with nationwide and international experience. He is author of "Conservative Christian's Guidebook for Living in Secular Times (Now With Added Humor!)" Read Michael Shannon's Reports — More Here.