01-07-2025
Here's Why People Are Upset About the Supreme Court's New Porn Age-Restriction (and How Billie Eilish is Somehow Involved)
If you're unfamiliar, last Friday, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision to uphold a Texas law, the goal of which is to prevent underage kids from accessing online pornography. The strategy outlined in the Supreme Court's recent Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton ruling is to require porn sites to make users submit official identification that confirms they're above age before they start perusing through all of that adult content. You may be wondering, how does Billie Eilish factor in here? Because that's a pretty reasonable question.
Now, while Billie's no Supreme Court Justice (but probably should be?), her name got thrown in the debate about this ruling thanks to her 2021 interview on the Howard Stern Show. 'I started watching porn when I was like 11,' she shared. 'I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.'
Apparently, upon hearing this soundbite, Republican Louisiana state representative Laurie Schlegel felt inspired to take action against the unregulated access kids have to porn on the internet. 'I just thought how courageous it was,' she told POLITICO in 2023 about Billie's statement, 'It just sort of reemphasized to me what a problem this is, especially for our children.' Schlegel then went on to introduce and pass the first state law requiring age-verification for porn, which started a ripple effect—18 other states passed similar laws (including the Texas one that was recently upheld).
The lawmakers or political commentators who critique this ruling (of which there are many) are, of course, not arguing that kids should have unregulated access to pornography. You would be a severe freak if you chose to die on that hill. What the dissenters do argue, though, is that porn sites asking for ID is an inadequate fix and technically an infringement on our First Amendment rights. By asking people to upload their personal information to shady websites like (or whatever your preferred pornographic outlet may be), you're technically hindering their access to protected speech. Then you're also making people run the risk of having their official identification info their porn search history attached.
And I'd argue that the line between a porn site and non-porn site gets blurrier every day. I was first exposed to porn via the hashtag #TittyTuesday on the app formerly known as Twitter. So when virtually every social platform has a dark corner where adult content's eagerly shared (check the bots in every viral tweet's response section, if you dare), why are only the websites explicitly branded as porn subject to this ruling? The children know how to look up #TittyTuesday! And, conversely, if all social platforms are to be redefined as porn, does that mean that we'd need to show ID everywhere we go on the internet? Where is the porn line in the sand here? Which would then become an even more major First Amendment no-no? There are plenty of gray areas within this subject topic, which is why the Supreme Court's dissenting judges in this case—Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—argued that the law should be subject to a strict scrutiny standard.
'Many reasonable the speech at issue here as ugly and harmful for any audience,' Kagan said in her dissent. 'But the First Amendment protects those sexually explicit materials for every adult. So a State cannot target that expression, as Texas has here, any more than is necessary to prevent it from reaching children,'
Instead, it was examined under intermediate scrutiny, which is a less rigorous standard of review and only requires that a law serve an important governmental interest and is substantially related to achieving that interest.
In short, this debate's not about whether kids should get to access porn but more about the means of stopping them from doing so. This case sets a weird precedent for applying a lower scrutiny to cases related to the First Amendment (free speech is no intermediate matter). And while lawmakers in support of this major ruling might love to keep Billie's name in their mouths, she might deserve some distance from this matter. Our girl loves free speech.
