Porn case in the Supreme Court this week is about protecting children, says Republican AG
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is fighting to uphold a Texas law he says is keeping the pornography industry from targeting children with harmful content.
Passed in 2023 and signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, the law requires porn sites to verify users’ ages through official documentation such as a driver’s license or government-issued I.D. Under the law, failure to implement this age verification results in fines.
Meanwhile, a collection of porn sites calling itself the Free Speech Coalition argues that the Texas law curbs their First Amendment rights and places an undue burden on Texas adults from accessing their content.
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Pornhub, the country’s most popular adult content website, went so far as to disable access to their website for all users in Texas after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled to uphold the law.
The two sides finally came face to face this Wednesday to make their case before the Supreme Court.
For its part, the nation’s highest court appeared united in agreeing with Paxton’s argument that states have a vested interest in limiting children’s access to pornographic content. Some justices, however, seemed to still have concerns about whether the Texas law’s prohibitions were too broad and could impact other areas of free speech expression.
The question before the court now is whether the Texas law should be subject to "rational basis" or "strict scrutiny" review, the latter of which would require Texas to meet the narrowest standards to uphold the age verification requirement.
Whichever way the court rules will likely impact not only the Texas law but also the over a dozen other porn site age verification laws in states across the country.
In an interview with Fox News Digital after the hearing, Paxton said he feels confident that the Supreme Court will rule in Texas’ favor.
"Hearing the questions and seeing the comments by the justices I feel very optimistic, I think we’re going to win this," he said. "I really feel good about it. I think most of the justices are going to come down on the right side."
"Even the other side making their arguments admitted that we have an interest in protecting minors," he went on. "They just said that the way we were doing that was some type of overburden on adults, and so they offered up other suggestions, those suggestions don’t actually work and that’s probably why they offered them up, they don’t want age verification because it actually works, and it affects their bottom line."
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In response to criticisms about the law potentially violating free speech, Paxton said: "Look I’m a huge free speech advocate. I see very few limitations on free speech. However, we have recognized that we need to protect children in all kinds of different ways. We don’t let them sign contracts, we don’t let them get married until they’re 18, we don’t let them be served alcohol, we don’t let them get tobacco, we have protected children, it’s been [throughout] our entire history."
"If you look anywhere in the developed world or anywhere [else], children are protected," he added. "It’s my job to enforce Texas law. In this case I feel very comfortable protecting our children from having this put in front of them."