“Invoking the innocence of children is not…a magic incantation sufficient for legislatures to run roughshod over the First Amendment rights of adults.”
It seems that a puritanical wave is sweeping the country as state governments increasingly try to make it more difficult to access pornography from within their borders. A lawsuit is challenging one of those laws, and this week, a federal judge allowed it to continue.
Montana is one of multiple states in recent years to pass a law requiring pornographic websites to verify users’ ages. Under Senate Bill 544, any website that “knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors” must “perform reasonable age verification methods to verify the age of individuals attempting to access the material,” so long as the site in question “contains a substantial portion of the material.”
The statute defines “material harmful to minors” as, essentially, the depiction of any sexual acts, covering everything from straightforward pornography all the way up to and including “bestiality.” It further notes that “reasonable age verification methods” can take the form of “a digitized identification card” or some other system that either checks a user’s “government-issued identification” or otherwise “relies on public or private transactional data.”
While perhaps well-intended, the law is a civil liberties nightmare: First of all, as a general rule, pornography is free speech protected by the First Amendment. And as Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote in the April 2024 issue of Reason, the sort of age verification law that some states now favor “creates a record, permanently attaching real identities to online activity that many people would prefer stay private,” and “even the best verification methods would leave people vulnerable to hackers and snoops.”
Yet another example of the government attempting to assume a parental function.
At the core of these laws is the proposition that kids are actually – somehow – damaged by seeing and learning about sex, naked bodies or masturbating. I strongly disagree with that argument – though it has never been successfully argued, empirically and with evidence, and see it, instead, as the vestiges of authoritarian religion that insists upon regulating human sexuality that persists in the culture. It persists, even after religion, itself, has disappeared from many of our lives. It’s a taboo that people continue to enforce even when they don’t know the reason for enforcing it.
The U.S. is the most puritanical, in this way, of all of the Western, democratic countries.
So, they think that by wasting millions of dollars to tighten the rules,
so much so that even personal information, freedom and individual rights to life and liberty are compromised,
it’s going to somehow stop a 12-year-old hormonal boy from sneaking playboy/playgirl magazines?
I mean, after all, they didn’t stop this adolescent behavior from happening before the internet was even born, right?
….
As to quote “Daddy Daycare”:
“First it was amusing…
Then it was annoying…
Now, it’s really starting to tick me off.”
…
No, really, I’m serious: when is registrant-fearing-and-hating society going to collapse on itself?
As always, this “Nanny State” attempt to control people’s behaviors with pathetically avoidable barriers, backed up with Gun to the Head demands for obedience, will make things worse.
Beyond the Nanny State issues, there is an overall privacy concern? How, exactly, do they verify my age everytime I try to access? Passwords bought with plastic was the standard for years, but once bought that password can fall into anyone’s hands. They will “need to know” it is in fact me, not someone else, every time?
Soon the State will “need to know” who you are just to get on the internet? Face/Voice verification will be required just to open your browser?
That is the future I fear, and this idiocy will bring us one more Baby Step closer to it?