“In Texas, companies cannot get away with showing porn to children,” he said. “If they don’t want to comply, they should leave Texas.”
The porn industry has fought efforts to ensure that minors cannot access sexually explicit videos on their websites. Age-verification laws in Mississippi, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, Utah, and North Carolina, for instance, have led Pornhub — one of the world’s most prolific porn websites — to stop streaming its graphic sexual videos in those states.
The website earlier this year ceased offering its website in Texas rather than comply with its age-verification law.
The U.S. crackdown on underage porn access comes as regulators in Europe have undertaken similar measures. The European Union in December announced that Pornhub, along with two other high-traffic pornography sites, would have to comply with age-verification and safety laws passed in 2022 by the governing body.
Church leaders have been warning about the dangers of pornography for years. In 2022 Pope Francis called pornography “a permanent attack on the dignity of men and women,” arguing that it “is not only a matter of protecting children — an urgent task of the authorities and all of us — but also of declaring pornography a threat to public health.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called pornography “a grave offense against God and his gifts to men and women” that offers “a means of selfish, lustful gratification” and which “attacks sexual desire and the conjugal act itself.”