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Adult sites effectively banned in 17 states. Is it really about porn? Or a step to something else? [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-01-03

Today porn. Tomorrow, what?

Any discussion on preventing teens from consuming porn must acknowledge that minors are real good at getting their hands on the taboo and illegal. Proof? After 55 years of the “War on Drugs”, it doesn’t appear that teens anywhere have much difficulty getting high.

But conservatives still believe they can pass a law and congratulate themselves on a job well done — even though the law is useless. Prohibition anyone?

In 2022, Louisiana became the first state to pass a law mandating that adult websites implement age-verification procedures to ban adult content from the under-18s. As of Jan 1, 2025, 17 Southern states have that requirement. Which includes fines for non-compliance. As a result, many adult sites, concerned about legal jeopardy, and led by the industry’s largest player, PornHub, will no longer supply content to people their servers identify as being from one of those states

And therein lies the rub. Thanks to virtual private networks (VPNs), computer users can appear to be in places they are not in, have never been to, or can’t even find on a map. Therefore, the law will have little practical effect — except maybe to frustrate some horny, but technology-challenged, old folk. Teens will have no problem watching whatever they want to watch.

No doubt the adult entertainment providers know this. So why bother risking fines when business will not suffer much, if at all? The cynic in me thinks it might even be good advertising.

This enthusiasm for passing ineffective laws raises a question. Are Southern legislators morons or do they have a larger agenda in mind?

I suspect some lawmakers — themselves technologically short-sighted — believe you can put up local barriers to internet content. However, I would not be surprised if most know they are merely passing messaging bills. In essence, these legislators are enacting laws to tell their ‘family values’ base voters that their elected representatives are on the case — ergo, ‘vote for me next time’.

However, I think there is a more substantial long-range conservative goal — the control of information nationally.

I know little about how difficult it is for a government to isolate a nation from the global flow of ideas. North Korea does it well. And China — with its ‘ Great Firewall of China ’ — seems to be good at restricting content to its citizens. So I imagine state actors have some useful censorship tools. In addition, these state censors have private allies.

You know that Elon Musk, and the other neo-apartheid, wannabe fascists would love to have their hand on the knowledge spigots. And whatever big money wants, politicians will be tumescent to supply. Musk is already co-President. And today the GOP House showed that resistance to the incoming administration is ephemeral. Those bozos will do what they are told.

Liberal dreamers may point at the First Amendment. But the current Supreme Court, with a likely decades-long conservative majority, has shown a sophist’s ability to find whatever they need in the Constitution, regardless of what that venerable document, or previous Courts, actually say.

I hope that for once I am thinking like a MAGA who has let paranoia cloud his judgment. And I am reading unwarranted significance into an otherwise banal act. Perhaps I am like a conservative thinker who sees the slippery slope and the thin edge of the wedge in every act by the opposition.

You know the type. They are the people who warned that legalizing gay marriage would lead to polygamy, child brides, and people marrying their pets. It has been a decade since Obergefell , and so far no pet, child, or multiple marriages allowed (beyond the child marriages already permitted under various state laws).

However, while the dire predictions of social collapse ensuing from same-sex marriage never came to anything, this Supreme Court — chockablock with sanctimonious religious activists — is probably itching to overturn Obergefell and Windsor . In exactly the same way they pissed on Roe.

There is a conservative assault on freedom in America. Voting is inching closer to the Jim Crow era. Curricula are now designed by zealots, not educators. Perverted ‘Christian’ thinking rather than reason is the intellectual coin of the right-wing realm. And medieval gender-role philosophy is a whip used to keep women in their place — domestic servants useful for reproductive sex.

No reasonable person is blasé about minors consuming porn. Especially porn that demeans women and reduces them to pleasure vessels. However, dictatorships are often grounded in reasonable ideas.

The original 192O party platform of the ‘Make Germany Great Again’ Nazis called for nationalizing corporations, profit-sharing, social security, uncompensated confiscation of large land holdings, free college, and religious tolerance. We all know how that worked out.

So I say again, we can all agree on the nominal goal of these laws, protecting America’s youth from relationship-destroying material. But reasonable people will understand these laws will not achieve their goal. And people who pay attention to history must question what the long-term goals of these lawmakers are.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/3/2295069/-Adult-sites-effectively-banned-in-17-states-Is-it-really-about-porn-Or-a-step-to-something-else?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

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