WASHINGTON—The Heritage Foundation today released the following statements celebrating the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, upholding Texas law H.B. 1181, which mandates age verification for access to online pornography. The Court found the law to be a constitutional means of protecting minors from online sexual material.
Annie Chestnut Tutor, policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology and the Human Person, praised the Court's decision:
“The Supreme Court’s decision is a historic victory for the fight to protect children from obscenity. Texas’s age verification requirement is constitutional, and states nationwide have a clear pathway forward to implement similar safeguards.
“Exposure to pornography does irrefutable harm to children, and this ruling holds online platforms accountable for willfully providing access to children. Age verification is the only technical solution to consistently and reliably keep children off adult websites. The state not only has a compelling interest to protect children from obscenity—it has a duty.”
Texas H.B. 1181, passed in 2023, requires websites with more than one-third sexual content to implement age-verification systems and display health warnings to users. Plaintiffs challenged H.B. 1181, arguing that it infringed on First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to the plaintiffs to review whether the court of appeals erred in applying rational-basis review to a law burdening adults’ access to protected speech instead of strict scrutiny. The Court ruled in favor of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, holding that the law is a constitutional exercise of state power to protect minors.
Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, added:
“This ruling rightly places the power in the hands of the people and their elected lawmakers to protect children from sexually explicit content online.
“The decision is a step toward grounding free speech law in the Constitution, not in decades of judicial invention, and allowing parents and lawmakers to act in the best interests of the next generation.”
Heritage believes this decision opens the door for other states to pass similar age-verification laws to protect children from pornography without violating free speech protections.
