By Trey Dellinger for AMERICAN THINKER
When one of my older brothers was a kid, he and some friends made a shocking discovery in a wooded lot across the street — an old porn magazine hidden away or thrown aside by a previous owner. My brother peering over his shoulder, one of the more foolish of the hooligans, stepped forward and flipped open the magazine. Horrified by what he saw, my brother turned on his heel and high-tailed it for the innocence of home. Sadly, for this generation of kids, that sort of innocence is hard to come by. With ever-present smartphones and computers, an ocean of porn is always just a click away. How did we get here?
Twenty years ago, the porn industry succeeded in getting a more liberal Supreme Court to strike down a federal law requiring porn sites to keep kids out. Since then, kids have become exposed to hardcore porn online at unprecedented levels.
Now, lawmakers across the country are stepping forward to reclaim innocence for our kids. They’ve passed state laws requiring porn websites to verify that users are adults. The porn industry, euphemistically calling themselves the “Free Speech Coalition,” is at it again, and has sued to enjoin Texas’s age verification law. They argue that exposing millions of kids to hardcore porn is just the price we pay for free speech. But their real agenda, which has more to do with conduct than speech, is to create lifetime porn addicts — profit at the expense of childhood innocence.
On January 15, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments in that case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. Lawmakers from more than 15 states, joined by the American Family Association and AFA Action, submitted an amicus brief urging this Supreme Court to apply a historically sound reading of the First Amendment and uphold these commonsense laws to protect kids.
