Texas puts a hold on Canada's purveyors of porn
National Post, 26 May 2024
U.S. Supreme Court upholds Texan age verification requirement for sites like Montreal's Pornhub
Donald Trump’s “hush-money” trial involving the pornography actress Stormy Daniels concluded in New York this past week. For those chronicling the descent of American politics, it should be noted that this year marks the 25th anniversary of Bill Clinton’s trial in the United States Senate in the Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky affair.
I am surprised that the Trump team did not call Clinton to testify on Trump’s behalf about how presidential candidates ought to handle what the Clinton campaign infelicitously called “bimbo eruptions.” If Trump is convicted he will regret using his wealth to stifle allegations instead of employing Clinton’s approach, which was to have his wife, Hillary, trash the reputations of the women who accused her husband.
Despite the Trump titillation, the important recent legal action on the pornography file was not in Manhattan, but at the U.S. Supreme Court. And it was not in relation to the various Trump matters the high court is entertaining.
Just as Manhattan’s criminal justice circus was putting up the big top for the Trump trial, the Supreme Court declined to grant an injunction against a Texas law that requires pornographic websites to verify the age of their users. The porn trade association, calling itself the “Free Speech Coalition,” had filed an emergency appeal against the law. Similar age verification laws are on the books in Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, Utah and Virginia, so it is not only a Texas matter.
Widespread porn consumption unleashes a cataract of social and psychological problems, independent of one’s moral judgment. The merchants of ubiquitous iniquity drape themselves in libertarian arguments, claiming that their product — degraded human beings — is analogous to alcohol, marijuana and gambling. There is much damage, they might concede, but that’s the cost of liberty. Courts have been sympathetic to those arguments for nearly a century.
So what can be done from a common good perspective in such a libertarian policy environment?
It’s not only a worry to those concerned about a corrupt culture where already two generations of teenage boys have become porn-addicted in early adolescence, regarding women as objects to be googled for male pleasure. Canada’s own proposed “on-line harms” bill is not about pornography — the Trudeau government is resolutely libertarian on marijuana, euthanasia and porn — but it is analogous. How to reduce the evident harm to the common good of the sewage that flows through the internet? Ottawa is concerned about hate, Texas about pornography, but the issue is the same. Should expression be regulated in a free society?
And while Canada’s government is absent from the porn crisis, corporate Canada is not.
It was more than three years ago that the impeccably progressive New York Times ran its searing analysis of Montreal’s Pornhub, a site which in 2020 attracted more than 3.5 billion visits a month, more than Netflix or Amazon. Regarding one of internet’s top 10 websites, the Times put the question: “Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?”
“Pornhub is infested with rape videos” wrote Nicholas Kristof. “It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for ‘girls under18’ or ‘14yo’ leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos.”
Canada’s internet giant responded at the time defensively, trotting out the usual libertarian bromides, but scrambled to take down hundreds of thousands of videos. Then it was back to business as usual, more or less. Amongst the sleaze suppliers, it is always more, never less.
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