(LifeSiteNews) — Pornhub, one of the world’s largest porn monopolies, is currently the subject of a class-action lawsuit by victims of sexual abuse who had their assaults featured on the site. It has been exposed by in-depth investigations – including a horrifying essay in the New York Times titled “The Children of Pornhub” – as a company that has featured graphic sexual violence, torture, and criminal sexual assault for the viewing pleasure of the public, leading to government inquiries and companies such as Visa cutting ties.
Pornhub was owned by parent company Mindgeek, which is based in Montreal. They recently changed their name to Aylo to “get a fresh start” – that is, to move away from the reputation their years of sexual abuse scandals have brought them.
And on August 31, Senior U.S. District Judge David A. Ezra of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas sided with Pornhub (along with several other porn companies and their legal allies) over parents and children by ruling against Texas’ age verification law, which was set to take effect on September 1. Ezra enjoined Angela Colmenero, acting attorney general, from enacting the law “pending further order or final judgment.” According to Ezra, pornography is protected speech.
According to Ezra’s ruling:
The Court finds that H.B. 1181 is unconstitutional on its face. The statute is not narrowly tailored and chills the speech of Plaintiffs and adults who wish to access sexual materials. The statute is not narrowly tailored and chills the speech of Plaintiffs and adults who wish to access sexual materials. [T]he law is not narrowly tailored because it substantially regulates protected speech, is severely underinclusive, and uses overly restrictive enforcement methods…The Court agrees that the state has a legitimate goal in protecting children from sexually explicit material online. But that goal, however crucial, does not negate this Court’s burden to ensure that the laws passed in its pursuit comport with established First Amendment doctrine. There are viable and constitutional means to achieve Texas’s goal, and nothing in this order prevents the state from pursuing those means.
The law – similar iterations have passed recently in other states – would have required porn sites such as Pornhub to implement “reasonable age verification” in order to “verify that an individual attempting to access the material is 18 years of age or older,” with sites also being required to feature a “Texas Health and Human Services Warning” in 14-point font or greater with facts about the impact of pornography such as “Pornography increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography.” This is similar to the warnings government requires on cigarette packs. The warnings on porn sites were required to include a national toll-free number for those struggling with mental health to call.
Acting Attorney General Angela Colmenero has “immediately appealed” the ruling and is asking for a stay of the injunction in order to move ahead with implementation.
Pornhub (Aylo) responded by stating that they are “pleased with the court’s decision today, which reaffirms our position that the age-verification law implemented in Texas is unconstitutional. We have publicly supported mandatory age verification of viewers of adult content for years, but any method of age verification must preserve user privacy and safety. The only solution that makes the internet safer, preserves user privacy, and stands to prevent children from accessing age inappropriate content is performing age verification at the device level.”
This is an obvious falsehood. Pornhub opposes meaningful age verification because a majority of minors now view pornography regularly, making up a significant amount of their traffic. In Louisiana, Pornhub’s traffic dropped by 80 percent when it began enforcing age verification, and it decided to pull its sites offline in the state rather than enforcing age verification. Internal discussions among porn executives have revealed that they believe age verification kills their traffic, badly damaging their business model. In short, their business model involves children and minors viewing pornography. Ezra enabled them in this disgusting ruling, and I hope he is made aware of it.
Personally, I think age verification doesn’t go far enough. I’m with Ross Douthat on this issue. In a New York Times column titled “Let’s ban porn,” he observes that porn is just a product that we could ban if we wanted to:
The belief that it should not be restricted is a mistake; the belief that it cannot be censored is a superstition. Law and jurisprudence changed once and can change again, and while you can find anything somewhere on the internet, making hard-core porn something to be quested after in dark corners would dramatically reduce its pedagogical role, its cultural normalcy, its power over libidos everywhere.
