The U.S. Supreme Court handed Texas Governor Greg Abbott a legal win on Tuesday amid his ongoing battle with pornographic websites.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined an emergency appeal from the Free Speech Coalition, which filed a lawsuit against a Texas law that requires age verification for pornographic websites.
Last June, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed House Bill 1181 into law, which requires pornographic websites to “use reasonable age verification methods” to “verify that an individual attempting to access the material is 18 years of age or older.”
In February, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Aylo, a company that owns pornographic websites such as Pornhub, YouPorn, and Brazzers, alleging that they violated the law signed by Abbott.
A spokesperson for the Freedom of Speech Coalition told Newsweek: “While the Supreme Court has denied our application to stay the Fifth Circuit’s decision upholding age verification requirements in Texas, our petition for full merits review before the Supreme Court remains pending. We look forward to continuing this challenge, and others like it, in the federal courts.
“The ruling by the Fifth Circuit remains in direct opposition to decades of Supreme Court precedent, and we remain hopeful that the Supreme Court will grant our petition for certiorari and reaffirm its lengthy line of cases applying strict scrutiny to content-based restrictions on speech like those in the Texas statute we’ve challenged. We will continue to fight for the right to access the internet without intrusive government oversight.”
Newsweek reached out to Abbott and Paxton via email for comment.
Shortly after the lawsuit, Pornhub restricted its website in Texas and called the law “ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous.”
“Not only will it not actually protect children, but it will also inevitably reduce content creators’ ability to post and distribute legal adult content and directly impact their ability to share the artistic messages they want to convey with it,” the website said.
Additionally, in March, Paxton announced another lawsuit against Multi Media, LLC, and Hammy Media, which own websites such as Chaturbate and xHamster, for allegedly violating the House bill.
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“PornHub has now disabled its website in Texas. Sites like PornHub are on the run because Texas has a law that aims to prevent them from showing harmful, obscene material to children. In Texas, companies cannot get away with showing porn to children. If they don’t want to comply, they should leave Texas,” Paxton said in a press release last month.
“I will continue to aggressively enforce HB 1181. All pornography companies lacking proper age verification safeguards on their sites should consider themselves on notice, because they’re violating Texas law.”
According to Paxton’s office, violations of the bill “will be subject to fines of up to $10,000 per day, an additional $10,000 per day if the corporation illegally retains identifying information, and $250,000 if a child is exposed to pornographic content due to not properly verifying a user’s age.”
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