THE NEW YORK TIMES – When does freedom for adults become cruelty to children?
The Supreme Court will hear arguments this week in a case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, that raises exactly that question. The Free Speech Coalition (a pornography industry trade association) is challenging a 2023 Texas law that requires sites offering pornographic material to “use reasonable age verification methods” to check whether a user is at least 18.
According to the law, “reasonable” methods can include providing “digital identification” to the site or complying with a commercial age verification system.
At first glance, the law is simple common sense. As Texas noted, all 50 states bar minors from purchasing pornography. Offline, identification requirements are common.
Showing a driver’s license to enter a strip club is routine. Zoning restrictions can push pornographic establishments out of neighborhoods and away from schools and other places where kids congregate.
“The weight of medical evidence demonstrates pornography can become both addictive and compulsive,” and the effects of addiction “are most acute in developing adolescent brains.”
Online, though, it is the Wild West. Children have easy access to graphic and hard-core pornography.
There’s a certain difficulty in writing about this issue — merely describing what children see online can be too much for adults reading family newspapers to tolerate.
As one teenager wrote in The Free Press in 2023, in fourth grade she was exposed to “simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism and unthinkable physical violence.”
Children wouldn’t have a right to see such content even if there wasn’t demonstrable evidence that pornography consumption causes harm. But now that evidence exists.
Last year, Peggy Orenstein wrote in The Times about a “troubling trend” in teenage sex. Rough sex is becoming ubiquitous …
