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.”

  • IHeartBadCode
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    788 months ago

    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.”

    WHY CAN PARENTS NOT DO THIS ASPECT?!

    This is the continual wild part of recent conservative bullshit. Everything the State is taking up is basically something a parent could step in and deal with.

    “My kid read a bad book that turned them into a frog! Which is also gay!”

    Well watch what your fucking is reading then and have a discussion about why you disapprove of it.

    “My kid is watching porn and now they can’t function in society and don’t want to get a $7.25/hr job of listening to Karens scream at them!”

    Then fucking don’t leave a computer in the their room perhaps? Maybe take their phone away at the end of the day? I mean or have a rational discussion about their ever changing body as they begin to become an adult? I mean any one of those is better than “OH I KNOW! I’LL LET THE GOVERNMENT PARENT FOR ME!!”

    And what’s wilder about the Conservative movement, the level of parenting has zero rhyme or reason.

    • Watching porn? — That’s Government parenting.
    • Working in a meat packing facility with blades so sharp they slice through literal bone? — Oh yeah that’s totally a regular parent thing.

    Fucking wild is what it is!

    I’m really struggling to wrap my head around where this line between Government overstepping and justified Government regulation is with them. If you don’t want your kid watching porn, then don’t let them fucking watch porn. Ideally you should have a talk about their ever evolving sexuality but clearly that’s just crazy liberal talk from me.

    I had some discussion with someone once about the 10th amendment and it relating to State’s banning abortion. And guy was like “Oh yeah this is a clear win for State’s rights!” And I’m like, the 10th amendment is setup that we have one of two winners at the end of the day. The State or the People.

    The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

    It says OR there. That means every “State win” is a “the people loss”. You do understand that right?

    Just fucking silence as that thought slow rolled into his brain’s processing center, that then subsequently hit the panic button because of overload.

    I just fucking can’t. DO you want Big Brother in everything or no? Because every inch you give to the Government helps them step-bro your ass.

    • @Garbanzo
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      278 months ago

      have a rational discussion

      Can conservatives even?

    • @orclev
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      268 months ago

      It’s because you’re thinking rationally and they not only aren’t, but can’t. Their position is inherently irrational but they want to justify it so they pick and choose and decide to just ignore anything that doesn’t support their desires. Saying states rights and small government has always just been an excuse, it’s just what they actually want isn’t something they can say out loud.

      States rights has always been about racism. None of them cared about states rights until it looked like the federal government was going to outlaw slavery. The next time they started screaming about states rights was when desegregation went into effect and they were forced to treat minorities like actual people. Literally every time they start talking about states rights is when they’re being dragged kicking and screaming away from racism.

      As for “small government” that’s just an excuse to cut social programs they don’t like. You know, the ones that most benefit the poor and minorities (although with the erosion of the middle class at the hands of the ultra wealthy increasingly it also greatly benefits everyone but the ultra wealthy), groups that conservatives have historically discriminated against (and once again it primarily comes back to racism). They’ll never propose cutting spending to groups they like, namely police (because they primarily target the poor and minorities), and the military (I think you can see a pattern here). They’re more than happy to support government spending when those dollars go to something that benefits the wealthy or hurts some kind of minority group.

    • @[email protected]
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      208 months ago

      I’m really struggling to wrap my head around where this line between Government overstepping and justified Government regulation is with them.

      It’s things they don’t like, if they don’t like it, regulate it until it disappears.

    • A Phlaming Phoenix
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      8 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).