U.S. District Judge David Ezra has issued a preliminary injunction preventing Texas from enforcing
a law which would require age verification with a government in order to access pornographic
websites.
The injunction stemmed from an August 11 lawsuit filed by various pornographic websites and the Free Speech Coalition, who alleged that Texas’ age verification law represented a violation of the First Amendment.
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In his ruling, Judge Ezra wrote that “the state has a legitimate goal in protecting children from
sexually explicit material online.” However, Ezra claimed that the Texas age verification law
“is constitutionally problematic because it deters adults’ access to legal sexually explicit material, far beyond the interest of protecting minors.”
Ezra suggested instead that Texas should employ parental filters, since “content filtering allows parents to determine the level of access that their children should have, and it encourages those parents to have discussions with their children regarding safe online browsing.”
Judge Ezra might have done well to consider the mandatory warning which accompanied the age
verification law. Under the law, pornographic websites would have been required to include a
warning informing viewers “pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm
human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses,
and weakens brain function.”
Indeed, Cambridge University neuropsychiatrist Dr. Valerie Voon demonstrated in 2013 that pornography viewers “develop changes in the same brain area – the reward center – that changes in drug addicts” which can result in development of tolerance that “ drives a search for ramped-up stimulation, and this can drive the change in sexual tastes towards the extreme.”