WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Friday to uphold Texas’ law requiring age verification for online pornography, maintaining that restricting minors’ access to obscene content is constitutional.
After Texas Governor Greg Abbott in 2023 signed into law HB 1181, which restricts online “access to sexual material harmful to minors,” the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association representing the pornography industry, filed a lawsuit.
The Coalition claimed that the law was “unconstitutional under the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause,” alleging “that adults have a right to access” pornography and that the Texas law “impermissibly hinders them,” the SCOTUS justices noted.
The majority of justices declared in their Friday opinion that H.B. 1181 holds up “under intermediate scrutiny because it only incidentally burdens the protected speech of adults.”
“The First Amendment leaves undisturbed States’ traditional power to prevent minors from accessing speech that is obscene from their perspective,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
“Age verification is common when laws draw age-based lines, e.g., obtaining alcohol, a firearm, or a driver’s license. Obscenity is no exception,” Thomas noted.
Elena Kagan filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
To date, at least 24 states have passed age verification laws for online pornography, according to the Daily Citizen. More than a dozen states have also declared pornography use to be a public health crisis as research demonstrates its negative psychological, social, and physical impacts.
The content made available by mainstream pornography sites has been shown to have profoundly damaging consequences for viewers, leading to addiction and the warping of the brain’s reward circuitry, a rise in sexual aggression, higher divorce rates, the fueling of the sex trafficking industry, and gender confusion.
The often violent and exceptionally perverse nature of commonly available online pornography makes the ubiquity of its use even more disturbing. For example, a variety of studies confirm the link between porn and sexual aggression. A 2019 study from the Archives of Sexual Behavior titled “The Association Between Exposure to Violent Pornography and Teen Dating Violence in Grade 10 High School Students” found that teenage boys exposed to violent pornography – which is the vast majority of them – are two to three times more likely to victimize girls, primarily through some form of sexual assault.
Texas’ age verification law forced Pornhub, the world’s largest pornography site, to shut down in the state in March 2024.
Following Free Speech Coalition’s lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Davis Alan Ezra issued a preliminary injunction in its favor one day before HB 1181 was to go into effect. Ezra ruled that the bill “substantially regulates protected speech.” However, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay that allowed the law to go into effect in March 2024.
The appeals court cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1968 decision in Ginsberg v. New York, which held that obscene materials could not be sold to minors, holding that “[o]bscenity is not within the area of protected speech or press” and that restricting materials based upon the age of readers or reviewers was “not constitutionally impermissible.”
Following the shutdown of Pornhub, lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart & Sullivan filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Free Speech Coalition.
The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently denied their request to block the Texas age-verification law, pending a final ruling.
