When the U.S. Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of a Texas law requiring porn websites to verify visitors’ ages on Wednesday, the justices will likely ignore some crucial context about such laws, which have been passed by more than a dozen states since 2022: In the words of one of their chief proponents, these age-verification laws are a “back door” to a full ban on explicit material, “starting with the kids.”
Even taking legislators’ stated aim of protecting minors from “harmful” material at face value, there is little dispute most of these laws are unconstitutional, as free speech advocates have argued successfully to lower courts around the country. “This case is not close,” wrote a federal judge in December, in an opinion blocking Tennessee’s age-verification law. The judge noted the “unwavering” line of Supreme Court precedent about the strict constitutional scrutiny needed for any law that restricts speech based on its content.
Applying this same precedent, a district court judge blocked Texas’s age-verification law, H.B. 1181, in August 2023. But the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed that decision and upheld H.B. 1181’s age-verification requirements last year under a more relaxed standard. The majority ruled such requirements were “rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in preventing minors’ access to pornography.”
The Supreme Court will no doubt focus on whether the 5th Circuit got the constitutional standard right, or whether, as a dissenting judge on that court wrote, the majority “unjustifiably place[d] the government’s interest upon a pedestal unsupported by Supreme Court precedent.”
Lost so far in the legal fight, however, has been the pretextual nature of the push for age-verification laws. In briefs to the Supreme Court, the Free Speech Coalition, an adult entertainment trade group challenging Texas’s law, only fleetingly addressed the law’s “true design” and “censorial intent” — as demonstrated by another provision that required websites to display warnings in 14-point font that porn “weakens brain function” and “increases the demand for prostitution.” These disclaimer requirements were too much for even the 5th Circuit.
But culture war conservatives have connected age-verification bills to the broader push to banish pornography from American culture entirely.
“Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”
“Pornography should be outlawed,” reads the Project 2025 manifesto, which, in keeping with the Texas law, claims porn is “as addictive as any illicit drug,” not to mention “as psychologically destructive as any crime.”
“The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned,” reads the Project 2025 foreword, written by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. “Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
Russ Vought, a Project 2025 contributor who is slated to serve as the incoming Trump administration’s top budget official, explained the “back door” strategy behind the age-verification laws last summer in a conversation that was secretly recorded.
“We’d have a national ban on pornography if we could, right?” Vought told undercover operatives from the British journalism nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting, which shared the footage with The Intercept.
Vought explained that his think tank, the Center for Renewing America, had been promoting age-verification laws as a workaround that sets up “the next fight.” When companies like Pornhub blocked users in Texas and other states that enacted the laws, that was part of the plan, Vought said.
“What happens is the porn company then says, ‘We’re not going to do business in your state,’” Vought said. “Which of course is entirely what we were after, right?”
In another discussion, also secretly recorded, Vought’s research director said his team was in favor of “outlawing” porn. “But right now we’re advancing the age verification stuff,” said Micah Meadowcroft.
Lawmakers in various states have likewise welcomed the porn blackouts that follow age-verification measures.
“I fully support PornHub’s decision to remove their content in Utah,” said Republican Gov. Spencer Cox after Utah’s bill took effect in May 2023.
Last year, the sponsor of Kentucky’s law, which went into effect in July, told reporters she would be “100%” supportive of porn companies blocking their sites. “I hope that’s what this bill does for the state of Oklahoma,” one of the legislators behind Oklahoma’s version told his colleagues during deliberations.
“If this case were about age verification for access to Shakespeare … there’d be no question that it violates people’s First Amendment rights.”
The Free Speech Coalition, the trade group challenging the Texas age-verification law in the Supreme Court, has six more active federal lawsuits against other states’ provisions. And so far in 2025, legislators in two more states — Missouri and Wyoming — introduced similar bills.
“If this case were about age verification for access to Shakespeare, for example, there’d be no question that it violates people’s First Amendment rights,” said Vera Eidelman, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney representing the Free Speech Coalition, at a press conference last week ahead of the Supreme Court argument. “This really is about how the government can regulate any speech that it doesn’t like.”
