She pointed to a law she spearheaded, which was recently signed by Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, ordering that “no interactive computer service shall enter into a contract, including the creation of an online account, with a minor without obtaining the consent of the legal representative of the minor.”
Texas state Rep. Matt Shaheen, who sponsored that state’s age verification law, told CNA he was “very pleased with the results” of the measure.
“Several porn sites now block access to their sites rather than follow the law,” he said. “I’m also extremely pleased the bill has been upheld by the Supreme Court.”
“A coalition of porn distributors unsuccessfully sued to block the requirement that porn sites perform age verification and now Texas children are safer from their filth,” he said. “I will continue to fight to protect children from being sexualized.”
Mike Stabile, a spokesman for FSC, told CNA that the organization supports efforts to keep kids from accessing sexual content online.
“At the end of the day, we don’t oppose efforts to keep kids from accessing adult content,” he said. “We don’t want kids on our sites any more than their parents do.”
But these laws do very little to keep kids from accessing adult content, he argued, citing overseas websites that might not follow U.S. law as well as the presence of adult content on social media websites.
Most users won’t comply with age-verification rules, he said, meaning porn sites that do comply with the laws see their traffic drop by upwards of 90% or more.
“We know our industry and we know the internet, and we tried to explain to legislators why this wouldn’t work,” Stabile said. “We think it’s an example of a law that sounds very good, that sounds common sense, but otherwise doesn’t have much effect other than punishing sites that comply.”
If the goal is to push the adult industry underground, these laws are effective, Stabile said. But they’re a “failure” at protecting kids, he claimed.
Device-level protocols — such as parental locks and controls on computers and mobile devices — are more effective at keeping kids from accessing unsafe material, Stabile argued.
(Story continues below)
Subscribe to our daily newsletter
Porn websites rank consistently among the most-visited sites in the world. Church leaders have been warning about the dangers of pornography for years.
In 2022 Pope Francis called pornography “a permanent attack on the dignity of men and women,” arguing that it “is not only a matter of protecting children — an urgent task of the authorities and all of us — but also of declaring pornography a threat to public health.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, meanwhile, has called pornography “a grave offense against God and his gifts to men and women” that offers “a means of selfish, lustful gratification” and “attacks sexual desire and the conjugal act itself.”
In 2020, Catholic anti-porn advocates launched a new online discussion and prayer platform called SOS Porn Deliverance, which offers “the opportunity for those affected by [porn addiction] to chat confidentially with an e-missionary trained in this mission.”
Daniel Payne is a senior editor at Catholic News Agency. He previously worked at the College Fix and Just the News. He lives in Virginia with his family.
Credit: Source link
