Culture & the Family

Effort to bar child access to porn overcomes critic pushback

March 21, 2024

Ray Carter

After the state of Texas imposed age-verification requirements for porn sites, Pornhub announced it would cease business in the state.

Oklahoma could soon join the list of states with similar age-verification laws for porn content. The proposal has received bipartisan support— and surprisingly vocal pushback from some legislators.

State Sen. Jerry Alvord and state Rep. Toni Hasenbeck have authored two bills—Senate Bill 1959 and House Bill 3097—that would allow families to opt out of access to porn sites on home networks and incentivize porn sites to have robust age-verification methods to prevent youth access.

Both measures have received strong support in their respective chambers of origin.

During floor debate, Alvord and Hasenbeck said the measures provide simple common-sense protections.

“This is a very simple bill: If you would like to protect your child from getting this kind of content on the devices that are in your household, this is now an option to you,” said Alvord, R-Wilson. “You can now push the button and you can opt out.”

“In the state of Oklahoma, you have to prove that you’re 18 to look at a site that promotes alcohol use,” said Hasenbeck, R-Elgin. “You have to prove you’re 18 to look at a site that promotes gambling or a site that promotes tobacco use. We are simply trying to make it more difficult for minors to consume pornography in the state of Oklahoma.”

Both measures require any entity that publishes or distributes pornography from a website to “provide Internet service subscribers and cellular service subscribers the opportunity, before any individual using such services may access the material, to request that access to the material by subscription service be denied.”

Any porn business that fails to do so could be sued and held liable for actual damages as well as potential punitive damages, including through class-action lawsuits. But companies that use “reasonable age verification methods” before granting access would be protected from liability.

Similar laws are in effect in several states, including Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia.

After similar protections were implemented in Texas, Pornhub announced that officials with that company “have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas” rather than deal with the process of preventing youth access.

The Pornhub announcement said the law would result in “driving users” away from porn sites that comply with the law, and “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.”

Opponents of the two bills appeared to reference Pornhub’s actions, although not explicitly, when debating against the bill.

State Rep. Andy Fugate, D-Oklahoma City, said the legislation “would have the unintended consequence of making it harder for adults to access adult content.”

State Rep. Jared Deck, D-Norman, suggested the bill could “drive folks into more of the dark web, using illegal sites.”

State Sen. Carri Hicks, D-Oklahoma City, also objected that adult access could be impacted.

“My concern is limiting access to Oklahomans by some unknown entity that determines something to be 30-percent pornographic or obscene and not having the right to be able to make that own determination for myself,” Hicks said.

She said the bill “sounds an awful lot like Big Brother making the determination for what my family can access.”

On the other hand, state Sen. Dusty Deevers, R-Elgin, opposed the bill because it restricted only child access to porn. 

“This bill doesn’t ban access to pornography for adults, so it would in essence protect access to adult pornography and only bring an age-verification for minors 18 and under,” Deevers said.

Fugate questioned what damages could be sought in court since the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders “doesn’t recognize porn as an addiction or any kind of affliction to minors—or anybody else.”

But Hasenbeck noted that research indicates 68 percent of children have viewed pornography before age 11, and there “is a strict comorbidity level between people who are addicted to alcohol who are addicted to pornography and who are addicted to gambling.”

And, she noted, pornography is a tool used by child abusers as well.

“Sex traffickers take very small children and expose them to pornography to get them ready for their first instance of sex trafficking,” Hasenbeck said. “It is not good for your brain.”

State Sen. Kristen Thompson, R-Edmond, made a similar point in that chamber, saying there “is a direct correlation between pornography and human trafficking.”

Fugate argued the legislation sent the message that lawmakers “don’t trust parents to make the right decisions for their kids 68 percent of the time and that this body should now co-parent with those families.”

But state Rep. Randy Randleman, a Eufaula Republican and licensed psychologist who has authored similar legislation, said the bill provides online safeguards comparable to those imposed for the sale of physical media containing pornography.

“We hide it in stores. We keep it in stores away from children,” Randleman said. “But we have a telephone here that we carry around all the time and we never protect kids from this. That is so wrong.”

Fugate complained that legislators have filed “bill after bill upon bill about porn,” and declared that he was “beginning to think this body has an unnatural obsession with porn.”

“Today we are being asked to step all over the Constitution,” Fugate said. “That’s what we’re talking about. We’re going to kick to the curb the fundamental freedoms of adults so that this body can vote on yet another porn bill.”

He said parents can use apps to block porn on a child’s phone or not allow a child to have a phone.

“Let’s just say what this is,” Fugate said. “This bill is 100 percent governmental parenting and it does it at the expense of the First Amendment rights of adults.”

But Hasenbeck noted online access to porn is much more ubiquitous than access to physical media containing pornography was during prior generations, and said her bill simply gives parents another tool.

SB 1959 passed the Oklahoma Senate on a 41-5 vote with bipartisan support. Three Democrats and two Republicans opposed the bill.

HB 3097 passed the Oklahoma House of Representatives with bipartisan support on a 85-13 vote. Eleven of the 13 opponents were Democrats, joined by two Republicans.

Each bill now proceeds to the opposite legislative chamber.