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SALT LAKE CITY — A California trade group representing adult entertainment companies filed a lawsuit against Utah on Wednesday, arguing that the state’s new age-verification law is unconstitutional.
The Free Speech Coalition filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that the state violated the First and 14th Amendments to the Constitution — specifically, the rights to free speech and privacy. The plaintiffs include Alliance, Utah pornographic writer DS Dawson, an anonymous adult entertainment attorney, and pornographic content creators and platforms.
The new law, which went into effect Wednesday, requires websites with “material harmful to minors” to verify a user’s age with a government-issued ID before allowing access to the site. The Utah Legislature unanimously passed the bill, and Gov. Spencer Cox signed it into law earlier this year.
Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross, the bill’s sponsor, explained that the purpose of the law is to try to protect children from sexually explicit material. “I wouldn’t blame porn for all of society’s ills, but I don’t think it’s helpful to have all these nasty and salacious descriptions in your head when kids are forming their images of sex and gender.”
lawsuits follow Pornhub blocks its content Statewide since Monday. In Utah, anyone trying to visit Pornhub, one of the most popular adult sites, will see a letter and a video arguing that the new law is ineffective and that there are other, better solutions to protect children.
I wouldn’t blame porn for all of society’s ills, but I don’t think it’s helpful when a child is forming their images of sex and gender and having all these filthy and obscene descriptions in their head.
– Utah Senator Todd Weiler
The coalition’s arguments in the lawsuit are similar to those of Pornhub — the new law is too vague and doesn’t spell out how to measure whether a site’s material is “harmful to children.” In addition, the complaint noted, the law was not easily enforced. Users can bypass the law by using a VPN or the dark web.
Instead, the coalition recommends that parental controls and filtering software and apps do more to protect children than age verification.
“Utah law restricts adults’ access to lawful speech and violates decades of Supreme Court precedent,” Alison Bodden, the coalition’s executive director, said in a statement. “We are fighting not just for the rights of our members and the larger adult entertainment community, but for the right of all Americans to constitutionally protected expression in the privacy of their own homes.”
The complaint also claims that Utah currently has no way to securely verify digital IDs online. As such, website owners will develop their own platform to digitally verify government-issued ID.
The Utah law restricts adults’ access to legal speech, violating decades of Supreme Court precedent.
– Alison Boden, Executive Director, Free Speech Coalition
The new age-verification law is part of the state’s long-running legal effort to limit children’s exposure to pornography.Utah was the first to officially declare Pornography is a public health crisis. Weller connects it to Recent Utah Laws Requiring age verification for social media platforms to prohibit minors from using social media between 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m.
Utah is the second state to pass a law requiring age verification for access to adult entertainment sites. Louisiana passed the first one last year, and state lawmakers are now considering a follow-up that would impose fines on sites that don’t comply.
Arkansas passed a similar law that will go into effect this summer, and lawmakers in Arizona and South Carolina are also considering age-verification bills.
This article will be updated.
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