One judge dissents, saying Texas law "limits adults' access to protected speech."

One judge dissents, saying Texas law “limits adults’ access to protected speech.”

Texas can enforce a law requiring age-verification systems on porn websites, the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled Thursday. The appeals court vacated an injunction against the law’s age-verification requirement but said that Texas cannot enforce a provision requiring porn websites to “display health warnings about the effects of the consumption of pornography.”

In a 2-1 decision, judges ruled that “the age-verification requirement is rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in preventing minors’ access to pornography. Therefore, the age-verification requirement does not violate the First Amendment.”

The Texas law was challenged by the owners of Pornhub and other adult websites and an adult-industry lobby group called the Free Speech Coalition. “We disagree strenuously with the analysis of the Court majority,” the Free Speech Coalition said. “As the dissenting opinion by Judge [Patrick] Higginbotham makes clear, this ruling violates decades of precedent from the Supreme Court.”

  • A Phlaming Phoenix
    3·
    4 months ago

    There’s a better way to legislate/regulate this that conservatives are either intentionally overlooking or are just too ignorant to come up with on their own.

    Instead of putting up easily circumvented barriers to accessing porn, why not require that sites which serve adult material be labeled with an HTML meta tag indicating as much? This puts responsibility for compliance on the content providers while allowing for parents to install applications on their kids’ devices that deny access to that material. Parents can then have their parental rights to allow or deny access to this material while content providers are minimally burdened to set up the necessary protections. Nothing is outright banned, so everyone keeps their freedom to produce or consume porn. It also establishes a framework for indicating more granular detail about the kind of content offered on a per-page basis, allowing for finer parental controls (around, say, gambling or cryptocurrency or non-pornographic sexual material or violence or literally anything you like).