Key Updates
June 27, 2025
Ruling against the online porn industry and those who object on free speech grounds, the Supreme Court has affirmed a Texas law requiring age verification on explicit websites.
In a decision issued Friday, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that “the power to require age verification is within a State’s authority to prevent children from accessing sexually explicit content.”
The ruling represents the first legal challenge to age-verification restrictions, which have gone into effect in 24 states as measures to protect children from exposure to porn.
“This decision delivers a blow to an industry that profits by bypassing parental oversight and flooding the internet with unfiltered, explicit content,” Colorado Christian University’s think tank, the Centennial Institute, wrote in response. “The notion that any adult content provider can make their material available to anyone, at any time, without restraint is incompatible with the constitutional rights of parents to protect the upbringing of their children.”
Family Policy Alliance, the lobbying partner of the Christian ministry Focus on the Family, celebrated the decision as “the beginning of the end of Big Porn companies corrupting our kids’ views of romance and sexual intimacy.”
Update by CT’s Kate Shellnutt.
January 15, 2025
Laws in 20 states aimed at shielding minors from online pornography are under fire as the US Supreme Court hears a legal challenge Wednesday with the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) among many interceding for the Texas law at the center of the case.
At issue is Texas House Bill 1181, one of a string of 20 such laws passed since Louisiana began the charge in 2022 to require websites containing at least 33 percent pornographic materials to verify that a user is at least 18 years old.
The Free Speech Coalition, an adult entertainment industry trade association, is challenging the laws and has a hearing before the High Court, arguing that the regulations endanger free speech and privacy rights of site users. The Texas case is appealed from the US Fifth Circuit, which upheld for Texas.
The ERLC, in a brief filed November 22, said the US Constitution does not prohibit states from regulating materials that are obscene to minors, and presented historical evidence dating to the 17th century.
“The Fifth Circuit’s decision aligns with the history of State regulation of obscenity and this Court’s tradition of respecting the broad police powers enjoyed by the States to protect minors from obscene entertainment,” the ERLC said in the brief. “While Texas might have done more, it legislated only as much as was necessary to protect children from exposure to harmful, obscene sexual materials. H.B. 1181 accords with the history of State regulation of material that is obscene for minors, and so it is plainly constitutional.”
As Christianity Today previously reported, Texas’ age-verification bill was sponsored by state senator Angela Paxton, a member of Prestwood Baptist Church, and drafted in consultation with Prestonwood pastor Mike Buster and Christian child safety advocate Chris McKenna.
Tennessee’s law, originally scheduled to take effect January 1, 2025, was only allowed to take effect late Tuesday when the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuitstayed an injunction the Free Speech Coalition had secured in December to block the law’s implementation. In Georgia, a law passed in 2024 is set to take effect in July.
In response, the most-visited adult website Pornhub has blocked access to its site in most of the states where age verification laws have been passed, leaving access available in Georgia, Louisiana and Tennessee, CNN reported.
Nearly 60 lawmakers from 15 of the states where laws are in effect jointly filed an amicus brief in support of the Texas law—and by extension their own.
“In sum, speech regulations are scrutinized more leniently, and First Amendment protections are at their weakest when children are at risk; where no criminal prosecution or total ban or prior restraint or viewpoint discrimination is present; where the law regulates conduct; and where the content is sexually graphic and is broadly disseminated in a manner that may expose children,” reads the brief submitted by lawmakers. “H. B. 1181 is just such a law. Its sole purpose is to restrict children’s access to sexually graphic material.”
Legislators signing the brief, filed November 15, 2024, represented Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah. In addition to the aforenamed states and Texas, similar laws are in effect in Virginia, South Dakota, and Oklahoma.
The ERLC also supports the state laws on moral grounds in concert with Southern Baptist beliefs.
“As articulated in their statement of faith, Southern Baptists believe that God gave all of humanity free choice when it comes to questions of morality,” the ERLC wrote, referencing the Baptist Faith & Message 2000. “But minors often lack the developmental capacity or moral maturity to know how to exercise that free choice responsibly.
“Thus, Southern Baptists believe it is important to structure society and society’s rules to maximize the ability to educate and train minors on their social and moral responsibilities. And while it is primarily the role of families to provide this education and training, the States certainly have an important role to play in this process—most significantly by protecting the ability of families to perform their role.”
Laura Schlegel, a Republican Louisiana representative who authored the first successful online age verification law in the nation, is also a licensed professional counselor and certified sex addiction therapist. Exposure to porn harms children and adolescents, she said in her brief.
Girls who view pornography are more likely to see themselves as objects of male pleasure, struggle with self-esteem issues, have higher rates of self-harm and suffer more vulnerability to sexual exploitation; while boys develop unrealistic and harmful attitudes toward sex and relationships that lead to increased aggression and difficulties in forming genuine intimate connections, Schlegel said. Anxiety, depression and engagement in risky sexual behavior are pronounced.
“Protecting minors from obscene content isn’t just a compelling interest legally,” Schlegel said, “it is a compelling, bipartisan issue at every kitchen table in this country.”
McKenna, founder of Protect Young Eyes, told CT in 2023, “I believe that church leaders should be showing up in flocks to support legislation that works toward creating safer digital spaces for children. Families need more help.”
