Last year my state of Mississippi passed a law that requires age verification before entering…..and Mississippi is not alone this movement has swept through the South in break neck speed.

The idea was to protect underage viewers from accessing these sites to look a porn.

My question is how successful has this battle been?

The panic over porn has spread through the South, with Pornhub’s parent company Aylo cutting off access to its sites in states that have instituted age-verification requirements: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia.

These laws are positioned as protecting minors, though we’re not seeing the same enthusiasm for legislation to close a loophole allowing videos featuring children. That’s because the ultimate aim of the age-verification laws is not to promote the welfare of children but to criminalize access to anything pertaining to sexuality or gender that conservatives find objectionable.

The Pornhub bans are part and parcel of a movement seeking to return to a time when obscenity laws were thinly veiled curbs on LGBTQ+ rights. As Aylo notes: “Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy.” (The company has instead backed device-level age verification.)

With these laws, children are (non-voting) pawns used to justify discriminatory measures, from Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law to Target being successfully cowed via social media to hide or remove Pride merchandise from its stores. 

The conservative Heritage Foundation states that one of its objectives is to ban pornography in the United States—not just for minors, but for everyone. Yet it repeatedly tries to bring the focus to children and LGBTQ+ issues when it makes its arguments for the eradication of porn. 

In its Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which is part of Project 2025, Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts writes that “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.” He adds that “educators and public librarians who purvey [pornography] should be classed as registered sex offenders.”

https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/the-pornhub-bans-are-not-about-keeping-kids-safe

Here we go again…..from a party that thinks government is too intrusive to being the leader of intrusiveness.

Could we find a more accurate example of hypocrisy?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”