Star Tribune Op-Ed by Renee K. Carlson and Brittany M. Jones

On Jan. 15, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the court’s first big case on the regulation of pornography since 2004. In this case, the court will determine whether states can enact laws requiring pornographic websites to use effective age verification to protect children from harmful and inappropriate content.

As attorneys, we believe that the Supreme Court should rule in favor of Texas and the other 18 states that have already passed similar protections for children. As women, we believe that our daughters, nieces and all young girls deserve to grow up without inadvertently being exposed to the perverted “wild west” of unregulated internet pornography. In our amicus brief to the Supreme Court in this case, we lay out substantial scientific and legal arguments to support this claim, which we are honored to present to readers of the Minnesota Star Tribune here.

This is a landmark case with enormous potential impact, as the Supreme Court has only heard a handful of cases on this topic since 1997, when most American children did not even have independent access to the internet and inventions like high-definition streaming video and the iPhone were still years away. In the 1997 decision striking down the Communications Decency Act (CDA) in Reno v. ACLU, the court reasoned that children did not stumble on internet pornography because it was not as accessible as the radio or television. Since pornography is now more accessible than ever before, anytime and anywhere, this argument is simply no longer tenable, and many states have decided that age-gating laws are a reasonable way to reverse course on this crisis.