Supreme Court’s porn ruling continues the conservative revolution

In a landmark 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court upheld age-verification requirements for accessing online pornography sites, effectively overturning a precedent that had stood for more than 20 years. Alongside its January decision on TikTok, the ruling marks a new era in the court’s online First Amendment jurisprudence: the justices are increasingly willing to uphold government suppression of free speech for policy reasons. The opinion in the case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, who, until recently, was something of a free speech absolutist. Thomas made it extremely clear that his goal was to find a way to uphold the Texas age-verification law at issue, regardless of precedent. He had little choice but to acknowledge that in a 2004 case, Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union (known as Ashcroft II), the court had struck down a federal law requiring age verification to access online porn. But things had changed since then, he wrote:With the rise of the smartphone and instant streaming, many adolescents can now access vast libraries of video coWeiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times