Good Start — Now Let's Ban Porn Entirely - The Patriot Post

Pornography is an ever-growing cancer on society. With the advent of the Internet and the growing need for children to be using it for school, the likelihood of them accessing or accidentally stumbling upon porn is a near certainty. According to a research report conducted by Common Sense Media: “44% [of kids] have seen [porn] intentionally. Additionally, 58% have seen it accidentally.”

Pornography is addictive, and the porn of today can be extremely dark, violent, and dangerous. With the advancement of artificial intelligence and deep fake technology, people are also able to make porn with an innocent person’s face or porn involving minors. It is not a victimless industry, and it is getting worse, especially when kids are exposed to or used by it.

States like Louisiana have taken steps to protect minors from accessing online pornography. According to a new state law, Louisiana residents need to verify their age with their driver’s license through a government-run site called AllpassTrust. If someone under the age of 18 views porn or a site whose content is at least 1/3 pornography, the porn company can be sued.

The actual language of the bill is as follows:

Pornography is creating a public health crisis and having a corroding influence on minors. Due to advances in technology, the universal availability of the internet, and limited age verification requirements, minors are exposed to pornography earlier in age. Pornography contributes to the hyper-sexualization of teens and prepubescent children and may lead to low self-esteem, body image disorders, an increase in problematic sexual activity at younger ages, and increased desire among adolescents to engage in risky sexual behavior.

Pornography may also impact brain development and functioning, contribute to emotional and medical illnesses, shape deviant sexual arousal, and lead to difficulty in forming or maintaining positive, intimate relationships, as well as promoting problematic or harmful sexual behaviors and addiction.

As Not the Bee points out, “The law is targeted at protecting minors because porn is ‘creating a public health crisis’ (entities like the CDC have used this language to justify coming after guns and pushing woke policies, so good on Louisiana for using the Left’s own language against them).”

Interestingly, companies like Pornhub complied pretty quickly to Louisiana’s new ID requirement. That quick turnaround has inspired other states — Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, Mississippi, South Dakota, Virginia, and West Virginia — to introduce similar legislation. Arkansas, Kansas, and Virginia have already had the legislation pass in one of their houses of government.

South Dakota’s porn ID legislation, however, fell victim to a political lobby and is dead in the state’s senate. In other words, the captains of the porn industry may comply once the bill is passed, but they will work to kill bills in their nascent forms by hook or by crook.

The Louisiana law is a great start, but perhaps it doesn’t go far enough. As legislators who wrote the law noted, pornography contributes to all sorts of amoral behavior and not only influences sexual behavior and expectations but also the brain. These adverse effects on the consumers of porn are not limited to minors. Pornography doesn’t have any positive contributions to society as an industry and harms those who use it, make it, and profit from it.

It should be banned entirely.