Adult filmmakers are asking judges to postpone Utah state law requiring age verification of porn sites
The law marks Utah’s latest attempt to combat pornography and builds on years of anti-porn efforts in the state’s GOP-controlled legislature.
(Rick Bowmer | AP) Lawyers representing adult entertainers, adult writers and sex educators have asked a judge to shelve a Utah law that requires visitors to porn websites to confirm their age.
Lawyers representing adult entertainers, erotica writers and sex educators on Wednesday asked a judge to shelve a Utah law that requires porn and other adult websites to verify the age of users.
The Free Speech Coalition and its fellow plaintiffs argued that the new state law violates their clients’ First Amendment rights and invades the privacy of individuals who seek to view sexually explicit material. Her request for an injunction against the law comes less than a month after Utah’s age verification law went into effect, prompting her to file a lawsuit.
“The law is a poorly crafted solution to a poorly articulated problem, and the public interest is not promoted by the persistence of an overly restrictive, vague, and overly broad law that endangers the rights of Utah residents to provide constitutionally protected material about the law and to receive “Internet,” they argued in a motion to delay implementation of the law filed in federal court on Wednesday.
Free Speech Coalition attorney Gill Sperlein said the stay was necessary because the First Amendment and the financial damages the law is inflicting on publishers of websites subject to the law are well underway and over the course of the two or three years it would take to solve the case. The state now has time to submit a response before the judge makes a decision.
The motion to delay the law reflects the Free Speech Coalition’s original complaint, as requests for injunctive relief are judged in part on the parties’ chances of success in their lawsuits. They argued that the law placed an unconstitutional burden on website owners, content creators and anyone who uses certain areas of the internet.
These groups, the motion to stay the law said, will suffer “constitutional harm every day that the law remains in effect.”
“The state of Utah, meanwhile, has no legitimate interest in enforcing a manifestly unconstitutional law that has only been in effect for a few weeks,” it said.
It is currently illegal under federal law to display child pornography, but restrictions are rarely enforced and courts have weighed restrictions against concerns raised through enforcement mechanisms for decades.
States have recently attempted to step up enforcement, with Utah lawmakers making the state the second state in the country to require adult sites to verify the age of visitors earlier this year. Lawmakers argued that the widespread availability of explicit materials online could harm children. Republican Senator Todd Weiler, who created the law, likened it to requiring identification for alcohol or online gambling. But opponents, like the Free Speech Coalition, have called the age verification restrictions a First Amendment concern that would not just affect minors.
The law represents Utah’s latest effort to combat pornography and builds on years of anti-porn efforts in the state’s GOP-controlled legislature, where the majority of representatives are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s seven years since Utah became the first state to declare pornography a “public health crisis,” and two years after lawmakers passed a measure paving the way for Internet-enabled devices to be equipped with children’s porn filters.
Louisiana passed a similar law last year. In the absence of legal challenges, similar proposals are expected to go into effect in Mississippi and Arkansas later this summer
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