By GARRETT BERGQUIST
WISH-TV | wishtv.com
A state senator on Wednesday said free speech protections don’t extend to pornographic websites.
Sen. Mike Bohacek has filed legislation that would require any website on which at least one-third of the content is deemed harmful to minors, as defined in state law, to force all visitors to verify their ages.
He says, in practice, the verification most likely would take the form of scanning driver’s licenses.
The Republican from the northwest Indiana town of Michiana Shores says his bill would prohibit websites or their verification contractors from retaining identifying information.
House Republicans have filed similar legislation.
“Quite frankly, access to some of these websites is exacerbating an already tough problem for some of these kids,” Bohacek said. “The expectation of what an adult relationship, or what a mature relationship should look like, is getting a little bit perverted to the point where kids feel like they have to do something that is way more mature than a 13-, 14- or 15-year-old should be dealing with.”
Louisiana, Utah, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi have passed laws similar to Bohacek’s proposal.
A federal judge in September struck down Texas’ law as unconstitutionally broad, though an appeals court has allowed the law to take effect while judges take a second look.
A federal judge in Utah rejected a lawsuit over that state’s law.
The question of how to regulate online pornography has bedeviled policymakers since the earliest days of the internet. The federal Communications Decency Act of 1996 prohibited knowingly transmitting obscene or indecent material to someone younger than 18. It provided exceptions for someone who had age-verification protocols. The United States Supreme Court struck it down the following year in a 7-2 ruling. The late Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the majority opinion:
“In order to deny minors access to potentially harmful speech, the CDA effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another. That burden on adult speech is unacceptable if less restrictive alternatives would be at least as effective in achieving the legitimate purpose that the statute was enacted to serve.”
Senior U.S. District Judge David A. Ezra echoed that ruling in his September judgment against Texas’ age verification law, writing blocking and filtering software programs “are more effective and less restrictive in terms of protecting minors from adult content.”
Kate Ruane, the director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, an organization which advocates against censorship, said bills like Bohacek’s violate the rights of adult visitors to such websites as well as the people who run those sites. She said it makes the content of such websites subject to the whims of governments’ interpretation of what constitutes harmful content. Ruane said a better option would be for online platforms to provide young users with tools, such as preplanned responses, to spot and disengage from unwanted content.
“Courts have time and again said that these types of restrictions violate the constitutional rights of adults to access constitutionally-protected content,” she said.
Bohacek said he doesn’t buy the First Amendment argument. He said the Indiana Supreme Court rejected such reasoning in a lawsuit filed against a law he wrote concerning revenge porn.
“This is not a First Amendment issue. This is a matter of responsibility and decency and following the law,” Bohacek said. “You can’t let a 15-year-old into a strip bar in northwest Indiana. It’s illegal. So what they’re doing is illegal.”
The legislative session will begin on Jan. 8 and was scheduled to run until March 14 at the latest.