States have the right to protect minors from the mounting harms of online pornography by imposing age verification laws on obscene websites, the Supreme Court has ruled in a 6-3 decision that its proponents view as a “major victory” in parents’ battle to protect their children from sexualization. On the other hand, the dissent from the three liberal justices visualized a time when three-year-old toddlers might have a legal right to access some “obscene” material.

The ruling came in on the Supreme Court’s action-packed final day, as it released all remaining opinions on Friday. Aside from upholding age verification laws, justices also safeguarded parental rights to opt children out of LGBTQ materials or lessons in public schools but upheld the constitutionality of a controversial Obamacare committee that forced employers to pay for drugs that violate their religious beliefs. 

States Can Protect Children with Age Verification Laws: SCOTUS

The Supreme Court applied the same legal standard to online pornography that already exists for in-person pornography. In a 6-3 ruling, justices upheld a Texas law requiring online pornographers to take reasonable steps to verify that obscene material does not fall into the hands of minors.

In his ruling on Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, Justice Clarence Thomas noted that “not all speech is protected” under the First Amendment, quoting a 2010 ruling that pointed out, “‘From 1791 to the present,’ certain ‘historic and traditional categories’ of speech — such as ‘obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement, and speech integral to criminal conduct’ — have been understood to fall outside the scope of the First Amendment.”

“States have two distinct powers to address obscenity: They may proscribe outright speech that is obscene to the public at large, and they may prevent children from accessing speech that is obscene to children,” wrote Thomas.

Texas, like other states, “requires proof of age to obtain alcohol, tobacco, a lottery ticket, a tattoo, a body piercing, fireworks, a driver’s license,” and “a handgun license” — a background check the court’s liberal bloc has not questioned. In addition to federal ID requirements to obtain certain medications or employment. Applying the strict-scrutiny standard favored by liberal justices “would call into question the validity of all age verification requirements, even longstanding requirements for brick-and-mortar stores” that sell pornography. Thomas concluded that “no serious question about the constitutionality of in-person age verification requirements for obscenity to minors has arisen” — even after reading the minority’s rebuttal.

The liberal bloc’s dissent, authored by Justice Elena Kagan and joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, began by conceding the government has a “compelling” government interest in protecting children from pornography:

“No one doubts that the distribution of sexually explicit speech to children, of the sort involved here, can cause great harm. Or to say the same thing in legal terms, no one doubts that [s]tates have a compelling interest in shielding children from speech of that kind. What is more, children have no constitutional right to view it. The Texas statute before us (H. B. 1181) addresses speech understood in First Amendment law as ‘obscene for minors.’ That label means the First Amendment does not protect the speech for minors. The [s]tate can restrict their access without fear of colliding with the Constitution.”

But Kagan accepted the premise that the Constitution grants adults the right to view pornography under the First Amendment’s freedom of expression. Thus, she likened the porn age verification law to a law “demand[ing] identification to gain access to websites addressing the [Supreme] Court.”

In a concerning example, the court’s liberal bloc also theorized about a law “requiring government ID to view speech that is protected even for children because one-third of the website’s contents are obscene for two-year-olds.” At present, the law does not acknowledge three-year-old toddlers’ unalienable “right” to consume any level of “obscene” material. No mainstream movement seeks to lower the age for viewing pornographic or sexually explicit material from 18 to three. At present, such proposals remain in the minority — a fact that pro-family figures celebrated.

‘A Monumental Victory for Kids and Families’

“This is a major victory for children, parents, and the ability of states to protect minors from the damaging effects of online pornography,” said triumphant Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R). “Companies have no right to expose children to pornography and must institute reasonable age verification measures. I will continue to enforce the law against any organization that refuses to take the necessary steps to protect minors from explicit materials.”

Daniel Schmid, associate vice president of legal affairs at Liberty Counsel, described the majority opinion as a “pretty common-sense” ruling. “We have we have age restriction and age verification requirements for all manner of things — driver’s licenses, purchasing various items in the store, registering to vote,” Schmid told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice shortly after the ruling. “The Supreme Court says the First Amendment doesn’t prohibit that.” 

Likewise, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) told Newsmax he could sum up the Paxton decision in “two words: common sense.”

Others praised the law’s potential to protect children from encountering online porn.

Online Porn Use Linked to Sexual Exploitation, Addiction: Studies

“Pornography is one of the great evils facing our nation today. Not only does it dehumanize and deny the dignity of each human person created in God’s image and likeness, but it poses one of the most insidious and damaging threats to human relationships, marriage and the family,”CatholicVote’s President Kelsey Reinhardt, told TWS. He added early exposure to “graphic, inappropriate content that can result in lifelong damage and trauma.”

An ever-growing body of evidence shows pornography distorts impressionable children’s (and adults’) views of sex, normalizes aggressive and degrading practices, and sets its consumers up for a life of physical and mental harms to themselves and others, including “vulnerability to sexual victimization, child-on-child harmful sexual behaviors, high-risk sexual behaviors, and compulsive sexual behaviors. A new report reveals?pornography website algorithms take users to more extreme material, desensitizing them, and spurring their escalation to?more extreme videos including child sexual abuse material and acting out what they see on real children,” noted National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE).

A 2015 study found that porn consumers are more likely to rape, sexually harass, or physically or verbally intimidate another person in order to “obtain sex.” A 2016 study discovered people who watch porn express less concern about sexual trafficking than those who do not. These harms, coupled with pornography’s addictive nature, caused then-Utah Governor Gary Herbert to sign a bill declaring that pornography has created a “public health crisis” in 2016.

“The Supreme Court delivered a major victory for states’ authority to protect kids from dangerous online content through age verification,” insisted Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), who sponsored the SCREEN Act (S.737), which would institute age verification reforms for online pornographers nationwide. His bill currently has two Senate co-sponsors. “With this ruling, there remain no substantive objections to a federal solution, so we encourage Congress to do what’s right for America’s kids,” said Michael Toscano, director of the Family First Technology Initiative at IFS.

Others hope lawmakers will go further to protect children from the baneful impact of online porn. “Age verification is one part of a multi-layered approach for protecting kids from accessing harmful pornography, and we hope that more states will consider age verification solutions, device filter legislation, and the App Store Accountability Act,” Dani Pinter, senior vice president of NCOSE, told TWS.

“Today’s Supreme Court decision is a powerful acknowledgment of the need to protect children from harmful online content,” Alexis Sneller, a policy analyst at the Pennsylvania Family Council, told TWS, adding that “nearly one in four children encounters pornography by age 12.”

Women’s collegiate swimming champion Riley Gaines called the ruling “[a]nother blow to the demented beings who are desperate to sexualize children.”

The ruling also engendered objections from the Legal Left. “With this decision, the court has carved out an unprincipled pornography exception to the First Amendment,” insisted Vera Eidelman, senior staff attorney with the ACLU. “The Constitution should protect adults’ rights to access information about sex online, even if the government thinks it is too inappropriate for children to see.”

“As it has been throughout history, pornography is once again the canary in the coal mine of free expression,” agreed Alison Boden, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition.

Even its critics recognize the decision will have far-reaching impacts on the heretofore unregulated flow of online pornography, possibly removing entire states from the smut industry’s market. “Many sites that cannot reasonably implement age verification measures for reasons such as cost or technical requirements will likely block users living in Texas and other states with similar laws wholesale,” complained the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Upholding the Texas age verification law was one of several pro-family rulings that came down Friday.

Protecting Parents from LGBTQ Curriculum in the Public Schools

The Supreme Court also reinforced parental rights in a 6-3 ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which guaranteed parents’ rights to opt their children out of books or lessons with transgender or other LGBTQ themes in the public schools.

“We have long recognized the rights of parents to direct 'the religious upbringing' of their children. And we have held that those rights are violated by government policies that substantially interfere with the religious development of children,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito. “Today’s decision recognizes that the right of parents ‘to direct the religious upbringing of their’ children would be an empty promise if it did not follow those children into the public school classroom.”

“A classroom environment that is welcoming to all students,” the court noted, “is something to be commended, but such an environment cannot be achieved through hostility toward the religious beliefs of students and their parents.” The court declared that it “is both insulting and legally unsound to tell parents that they must abstain from public education in order to raise their children in their religious faiths, when alternatives can be prohibitively expensive and they already contribute to financing the public schools.”

Alito also commended “the strong showing made by the parents” and belittles “the lack of a compelling interest supporting the Board’s policies.” Until all appellate review in this case is completed, the school board “should be ordered to notify them in advance whenever one of the books in question or any other similar book is to be used in any way and to allow them to have their children excused from that instruction.”

The Supreme Court reversed the appellate court decision and remanded the case “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”

In the liberal dissent to Mahmoud, Justice Sonia Sotomayor implied that public schools should form impressionable children for their role in Western “democracy” by deliberately teaching them “concepts that may conflict with their parents’ religious beliefs.” Sotomayor quoted a previous decision calling public schools “the symbol of our democracy and the most pervasive means for promoting our common destiny.” Sotomayor wrote that public schools “offer to children of all faiths and backgrounds an education and an opportunity to practice living in our multicultural society” and that this “experience is critical to our [n]ation’s civic vitality. Yet it will become a mere memory if children must be insulated from exposure to ideas and concepts that may conflict with their parents’ religious beliefs.”

Some public education theorists, such as George S. Counts, also believed public schools exist to transform children’s values. Counts, who made two trips to the Soviet Union, encouraged teachers to “endeavor to enlist their [students’] loyalties and enthusiasms in the realization of the vision” of a new left-wing society in his monograph “Dare the School Build a New Social Order?”

Supreme Court Upholds Controversial Obamacare Board

In a case upholding a controversial Obamacare board, justices ruled Congress has the right to delegate authority to unelected boards under the Affordable Care Act.

The case, Kennedy v. HHS, stemmed from a religious employer who believes the HHS mandate to cover the anti-AIDS drug PrEP “encourages and facilitates homosexual behavior,” which the CDC has long documented as the primary driver of HIV infection and which Christianity classifies as immoral. But the case did not revolve around vindicating the First Amendment right to freedom of religion but rather the constitutionality of delegated authority. Instead, he challenged the constitutionality of the U. S. Preventive Services Task Force, which categorized PrEP as a preventative drug. Its most controversial decision, the so-called “HHS mandate,” required employers to cover contraceptives, sterilization, and potentially abortion-inducing drugs as mandatory “preventative care.” The court upheld the board’s constitutionality.

In a mammoth, 38-page dissent joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, Justice Thomas denied the right to transfer such authority. “Under our Constitution, appointment by the [p]resident with Senate confirmation is the rule. Appointment by a department head is an exception that Congress must consciously choose to adopt. The Framers established this rule to ensure that the [p]resident is accountable for the selection of officers in the [e]xecutive [b]ranch. And, it is the law, whether we agree with it or not,” they wrote.

Pro-Family Advocates: ‘Alleluia’ to Supreme Court Rulings

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, expressed his feelings about the ruling in only one word: “Alleluia!”

“The rights of parents and children are under attack, and this is especially true of the rights of religious parents and children. Those leading the attack are secular militants, the most intolerant of all Americans,” he said, praising the Supreme Court’s recent rulings on age verification, defunding Planned Parenthood, and upholding parental rights to opt their children out of LGBTQ ideology in the public schools. “The good news is that their morally debased agenda took a serious hit with these three Supreme Court rulings.”

“This ruling is a monumental victory for kids and families across America, validating more than 20 laws nationwide,” the Institute for Family Studies, which filed an amicus brief in the case, told TWS. “The Paxton ruling makes age verification laws constitutional. Now, we have to ensure that they are adopted nationwide.”