The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments this week over whether a 2023 Texas law regulating adult entertainment websites, including Pornhub, infringes upon First Amendment rights of adults seeking to access online pornography. The Texas law requires such companies to use age verification measures to ensure users are at least 18 years old.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is in favor of the law, which has forced Pornhub to disable access to its website for people in Texans. (There is no law yet that forbids a Texan from crossing the state border to access such content.)
The lawyer arguing on behalf of the Free Speech Coalition (the adult entertainment websites), Derek Shaffer, argues it’s up to parents (not websites) to keep inappropriate content from their children.
TODAY: Attorney General Ken Paxton defended a Texas law that protects children by requiring online pornography sites to institute reasonable age verification measures at the Supreme Court of the United States. pic.twitter.com/VuskiUheDS
— Texas Attorney General (@TXAG) January 15, 2025
Paxton said at a press conference after oral arguments: “We are not going to lose. We are going to have the right to enforce this. I have no doubt about that.”
Democratic political pundit Molly Jong-Fast shared a section from the SCOTUS transcript, above, which includes Justice Samuel Alito asking Shaffer about Pornhub: “Is it like the old Playboy magazine? You have essays there by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William Buckley, Jr?” (Shaffer replied, “No in that sense.”)
Jong-Fast, daughter of writer Erica Jong (Fear of Flying), whose interview with Playboy was featured in the September 1975 issue, replied: “Please enjoy justice Alito musing about Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Junior.” As seen above, in 2019, Playboy hosted a talk with Jong and Jong-Fast promoted as a “candid Mother’s Day conversation.”
As Alito now knows, nothing in that Playboy interview or the more recent mother-daughter conversation is as candid — to use one word — as what the cameras of Pornhub capture, a fact that gives Paxton confidence that the law will persist.