The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Friday that states with laws requiring age verification for porn sites is constitutional. The case, known as Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton (Ken Paxton is the Attorney General of Texas), was decided 6-3 with the court’s three liberal justices dissenting.
The Texas law, which requires age verification using a credit card or a government-issued ID document, went into effect in 2023 and Pornhub started blocking access to the site in the Lone Star State in protest. Justice Clarence Thomas, a far-right extremist, wrote the opinion of the court, noting that “not all speech is protected” under the First Amendment.
“History, tradition, and precedent recognize that States have two distinct powers to address obscenity: They may proscribe outright speech that is obscene to the public at large, and they may prevent children from accessing speech that is obscene to children,” Thomas wrote in his opinion.
“In addition to their general interest in protecting the public at large, States have a specific interest in protecting children from sexually explicit speech,” Thomas wrote.
During oral arguments, Justice Thomas suggested changes in technology had made age verification laws necessary, while making a confusing argument. “We’re in an entirely different world,” Thomas said. “Playboy was about squiggly lines on cable TV.”
The justice may be speaking from long-term experience. Thomas was confirmed as a justice in 1991 after contentious hearings about his sexual harassment of Anita Hill. A girlfriend of Thomas would later claim Thomas was “obsessed with porn,” according to NPR and talked about it frequently.
The plaintiff in the case against the Texas law, Free Speech Coalition, is a group formed by porn companies like Pornhub to fight the age verification requirements, which they argue are intrusive and unnecessary. The porn industry would like age verification to be done by Big Tech companies at the device level rather than forcing individual sites to handle so much private information, which they argue introduces unnecessary risk.
The 19 states that currently have age verification laws for accessing porn:
Alabama
Arkansas
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