An age verification bill in Kansas that is the most extreme in the country has passed both House and Senate and is on its way to the governor’s desk. The bill will make sites with more than 25 percent adult content liable to heavy fines if they don’t verify that visitors are over the age of 18. It also calls being gay “sexual conduct,” which critics say could set up the state for more censorship of LGBT+ citizens.
That’s your worst-case scenario, right? That’s why these pearls are clutched? Well I don’t care. Minors with ready access to vanilla photographs of naked people, on above-board commercial websites? So what. The horrors imagined by conservative dullards are a mundane experience for millions of people, and relatively few of them become dog-fuckers or axe-murderers. Almost like a healthy libido is normal and 18 isn’t the day you take the shrink-wrap off your genitals.
Teenagers masturbating is a non-event. It’s as unremarkable and unpreventable as atomic decay. It will happen. Do you want it to focus on whatever quasi-erotica passes through the filter? Bugs Bunny in drag, beach volleyball, that one episode of their favorite show where everybody shrinks? Shoddy AOL filters probably made more furries than Disney ever did. AI’s gonna twist kids right up. Tell me with a straight face that’s better than real photos of fake tits.
So fuck it. I’m not terribly bothered if kids occasionally see gross shit on the internet. It doesn’t need to be illegal, for sites to keep undesirable content hidden by default or excluded entirely. The US has no laws against being an outright Nazi, but on any site not run by and for Nazis, that shit is not welcome. If logged-out Twitter users are one click from seeing some Rule 34 shit, that’s pretty far from the worst thing Twitter’s ever done.
By all means, keep actual smut off broadcast TV. Expect websites to put the weird stuff behind warnings. Don’t sell porn to minors. But if your website doesn’t take a credit card to visit, hey guess what, anyone can see it, and anyone will. Oh well. People who think that’s the end of the world are lunatics who mean it literally.
The anti gay part is the whole point. They're not protecting kids, they're protecting Christian control over kids (pay attention to who's actually doing all the child sex abuse)
This bill is unconstitutional, but we’ll have to wait and see if the insurrection-appointed SCOTUS will do their job or if this is like a gifted RV sort of ruling.
I’m confused. Wouldn’t heterosexuality be sexual conduct too? And also block information about heterosexuality of the same nature to kids? How is this specially anti gay
The only way this could be considered anti gay if we’re inferring the people in control choose what to block and are homophobic and biased enough to only block homosexual content. That’ll fucking explode if it happened.
Also, porn is fucking unstoppable there will be plenty of all kinds of porn for all to see. No worries
Yes, but if you only enforce the rules for “dirty homosexuals”, it effectively is an anti-gay bill. Conservatives have proven time and time again that they’re happy to selectively apply the rule of law in any way that suits them.
TL;DR: IANAL, however, the document this bill references to define what content is harmful to children directly, verbatim defines sexual conduct as including “homosexuality” broadly
Okay so this bill is SB394 (linked above obviously) and it opens with the following
Any commercial entity that knowingly shares or distributes material that is harmful to minors on a website and such material appears on 25% or more of the webpages viewed on such website in any calendar month, or that knowingly hosts such website (…)
It carries on to later define “harmful to minors” in section h-3 as the following:
(3) “Harmful to minors” means the same as defined in K.S.A. 21-6402, and amendments thereto.
If we go look at K.S.A. 21-6402 we can find that it is regarding “Promotion to minors of material harmful to minors” and goes on to declare in section d-2 that “harmful to minors” refers to several things including sexual conduct (I’m omitting this full quote for brevity, you can find it in the linked document).
Now if we look a little further down, we can see that Kansas currently defines sexual content as defined in section d-8:
(8) “sexual conduct” means acts of masturbation, homosexuality, sexual intercourse or physical contact with a person’s clothed or unclothed genitals or pubic area or buttocks or with a human female’s breast; and (…)
Considering all this, i think extremely reasonable to believe that this could outlaw LGBTQ+ content from being displayed openly online within Kansas
Whoops, Yes it was a little past 1am when I wrote that I must’ve gotten them mixed up which switching back and forth between the documents. I’ll double check and correct that in a moment.
I’m sincerely glad you actually read it all, the world can be a little fucked right now.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered
-A Promise to America", Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 5, Project 2025
Not just ban it, but completely outlaw it in the old sense of the word. Anyone who they claim “purveys” or “produces” porn could be on The List (you know the one). Of course, these terms will be defined in the broadest terms (one could likely assume they already have all the bills for this written on some legal expert’s hard drive as we speak, just waiting to be delivered to whoever they want to introduce it), and will be applied to pretty much anyone that they wish gone, at any time they wish them to disappear. Did you draw something mildly NSFW in your notebook when you were 12? That’s production. Did you write slashfic back in freshman year? Yup, you go on The List.
This also conveniently leaves the door open to class sex education material as “pornography”, which several states have already done (these states are generally testbeds for later national propositions).
While the Kansas state legislature is almost entirely Republican, they don’t tend to override the governor’s veto too frequently as they are not as lock step due to having all the power.
Without checking the numbers, this seem like the kind of thing they would let the governor’s veto atand so they can use it against her in the next election.
Other comments in here talking about porn, but merely mentioning you’re gay, bi, pan, trans, aro, ace, intersex, etc. is enough to qualify as “sexual conduct.” Absolute batshittery.
How will verification be done? Are they making the websites foot the bill for verification, which pornhub is super against, or are they going to make a centralized device verification, like how Louisiana did, allowing its residents to access pornhub again?
How is the 25% decided? Public content or private, like a Dropbox system? 25% by file size, length (how are pictures counted here), or just per item (would a gallery or picture be the item here)?
These legislatures know NOTHING about technology and how it all works and are just doing this for censorship and LGBTQ+ discrimination.
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