LEXINGTON, KY – As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear Free Speech Coalition v Paxton in January, the Family Foundation, along with several allied family policy organizations, has joined an amicus brief supporting Texas’s protections for children against online pornography.
Free Speech Coalition concerns a challenge to a Texas law that requires websites that host pornography as more than 33% of their total content to verify the age of their users. The Supreme Court’s decision to accept this case follows a Fifth Circuit decision that upheld Texas’s age verification law. The Supreme Court can now definitively rule that these essential protections for children, rightly passed by state legislators in Kentucky and in at least 19 states, are consistent with the U.S. Constitution.
You can read the brief, joined by over 30 of our allied family policy organizations, here.
Statement from David Walls, executive director of The Family Foundation:
“We urge the High Court to uphold these commonsense laws protecting children from harmful pornography. The Fifth Circuit was right to uphold Texas’s law, which protects children from harmful online content. States have a duty to protect children from the massive porn and social media industries that should be protecting kids rather than profiting from them.
“I continue to be thankful for the bipartisan vote in the Kentucky General Assembly to pass HB 278, and The Family Foundation looks forward to continuing to advocate for additional protections for children online, including from the harms of cell phones and social media,” Walls concluded.
The brief notes, “Much like tobacco or other controlled products, pornography’s impacts are even more harmful to young minds due to its addictive nature, and access to it should be properly age gated…As such, its effects on children are especially poignant, as this content is exceedingly harmful to their ability to form healthy romantic relationships as adults and their ability to function well in society as they mature into adulthood.”
The brief concludes by arguing, “Under the law, our society has recognized that children’s capacity is limited both neurologically and in maturity. Because of these limitations, legislatures are well within their authority to place boundaries on children that in some circumstances would not be permissible if applied to adults.”
The Family Foundation played an integral role in supporting the passage of Kentucky’s House Bill 278 in 2024 and in supporting its commonsense protections for children that protect them from harmful online pornography. HB 278 by Rep. Matt Lockett unanimously passed in the 2024 General Assembly. The Senate passed the bill 36-0 with an adopted amendment by Sen. Gex Williams containing the online protections for children. The bill was passed with a bipartisan vote of 96-0 in the House.
We urge the Court to uphold Texas’s law and to protect the right of states like Kentucky to protect children from long-term harm.
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The Family Foundation is the leading Christian public policy organization in Kentucky and stands for Kentucky families and the Biblical values that make them strong. Learn more at kentuckyfamily.org.
