There are perhaps few things more destructive to the family than pornography. The fact that kids around the country are so easily able to find it is an immense problem, and Louisiana legislator Laurie Schlegel decided it was her mission to do something about it. She interview with Nancy Rommelmann for The Free Press, excerpts of which follow:

Schlegel’s crusade started back in December 2021. She had listened to The Howard Stern Show and 21-year-old pop sensation Billie Eilish talking about online porn. Eilish told Stern that she began watching “abusive” images at the age of 11, and that this had warped her sense of how to behave during sex and what women’s bodies look like. …

Schlegel was struck by Eilish’s openness, that she was “just a young girl being vulnerable enough to share those details with the world.”

The singer’s story also chimed with Schlegel’s professional experience both as a sex addiction therapist and a court-appointed special advocate for abused and neglected children in the foster care system. She knew the issues facing young clients raised on unlimited free online porn—the decoupling of intimacy from sex; the inability to get aroused without porn playing in the background; a warped idea of what your partner actually wants.

“If you’ve never had your first kiss but you’ve seen hardcore pornography, it’s going to mold the way you view sexuality,” Schlegel said. “You’re not dealing with a fully formed adult brain that’s like, ‘Oh, so I shouldn’t strangle my partner?’ ”

If Schlegel understood the damage pornography causes, she also knew how easy it is for children to access it. And she realized that now she was a state legislator, she was uniquely positioned to do something about it.

She soon settled on the idea of legislation that, if passed, would require porn sites to confirm their customers were 18 or older before they could click through to their content.

“You can’t be 10 years old and go into Mr. Binky's—that’s an adult bookstore in my district,” she says. “This is public policy we’ve accepted across the board in brick-and-mortar stores, but we’ve just been giving a pass to the internet.”

While Schlegel attends a nondenominational Christian church and describes her faith as “very important to me,” she had no desire to impose her morality on others over the age of eighteen. “Adults have rights, so I get it,” she says, explaining that all she wanted was to craft a bill making it harder for kids to access videos like “[explicit title redacted].”

Long story short, she used “an electronic age verification system, called LA Wallet” that had been authorized during the pandemic as the vehicle for Louisiana House Bill 142.

The legislation requires online publishers of porn sites to require age verification, via an LA Wallet program called VerifyYou Pro, Anonymous edition, that users are over 18.

It passed, Pornhub lost 80% of its traffic in Louisiana, and other states are following suit, prompting Pornhub to pull out of several of those states rather than comply. Schelegl summed it up this way:

“Once you understand the gravity of this issue and realize what kinds of hardcore porn young kids freely are seeing online and how it is impacting them, how can you sit back and do nothing?” she asks. “That wasn’t an option for me. And hopefully doing nothing is not an option for the country going forward.”

Read the whole thing here, but be advised of some very graphic adult language.