Pornhub has pulled out of multiple states rather than comply with age-verification laws.
On June 15, 2022, a freshman legislator in Louisiana’s House of Representatives accomplished something no other lawmaker or activist in the country could claim: She passed a law that is changing the online porn industry.
If you think this was the result of a bitter culture war battle, think again.
“Pornography is creating a public health crisis and having a corroding influence on minors,” asserts the bill that state Rep. Laurie Schlegel introduced. Almost no one in the capitol in Baton Rouge disputes the statement; the bill sailed through the Louisiana House 96-1 and the State Senate 34-0. The bill holds pornography websites liable unless the websites “perform reasonable age verification methods” — in short, requiring users to show government ID to prove they are 18 or older. Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, no fan of the legislature’s Republican super-majority, signed the bill about a week after it arrived on his desk.
“I promise you he has no qualms about vetoing our bills,” Schlegel told me. In fact, earlier this summer, the governor had unsuccessfully vetoed a bill banning puberty blockers, hormone therapy and elective surgery for minors, calling it “so blatantly defective on so many levels.”
Though the first of its kind, Louisiana’s age-verification bill was not the last. Nearly identical bills have passed in six other states — Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Virginia and Texas — by similarly lopsided margins. In Utah and Arkansas, the bills passed unanimously. The laws were passed by overwhelming margins in legislatures controlled by both parties and signed into law by Democratic and Republican governors alike. In just over a year, age-verification laws have become perhaps the most bipartisan policy in the country, and they are creating havoc in a porn industry that many had considered all but impossible to actually regulate.
By Marc Novicoff
