Decent Hard-Working Perverts Sue To Block Dumb New Louisiana Anti-Porn Law

For fuckssake, Louisiana, untangle your dangly bits and lighten up. Go smoke some weed or something.

A coalition of internet users, sex-positive writers, adult entertainers, and anti-busybody activists filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against Louisiana's new anti-pornography law, which would require age-verification software for websites that include pornography and other "harmful materials" — which the law leaves up to the state's attorney general to define. Like if he thinks a common Wonkette calling him a dildo-huffing garden gnome buggerer is harmful to children, he could require we include an age-verification system to be read in Louisiana.

Fuck me sideways with a scroll inscribed with the text of the First Amendment in braille.

The plaintiffs argue that the new law stifles free speech and imposes an unfair burden on content creators, who will be forced to gatekeep their own materials when keeping kids off sites they shouldn't be on is parents' responsibility.

"These laws give the state the power to harass and censor legal businesses," says Alison Boden, executive director of Free Speech Coalition, a plaintiff organization composed of people in the adult entertainment industry. "We, of course, support keeping minors from accessing adult content, but allowing the state to suppress certain speech by requiring invasive and burdensome systems that consumers refuse to engage with is simply state censorship."

NOLA.com adds that other plaintiffs include

an online platform specializing in sexual wellness called Deep Connection Technologies, a sex advice columnist in Seattle and a Slidell military veteran who watches pornography while her husband is deployed.

A sex advice columnist in Seattle? Sounds like that could be Wonkette's good friend Dan Savage, although as of blog time he had not yet replied to a tweet asking for comment. Maybe the Seattle market can support more than one sex advice columnist, although obviously Dan Savage is the preeminent one.

The suit names fucking Louisiana Attorney General Jeff "Rodent Felcher" Landry, fucking Safety and Corrections Secretary Jimmy "P-Farts" LeBlanc, and fucking Commissioner of Administration Jay "Wankbiscuit" Dardenne as defendants in the case.

The law requires sites with porn or other "harmful content" to track users' ages through software that would upload state-issued identity cards, because why would anyone worry about uploading their driver's license to see nakey people doing it? NOLA notes that such software is relatively easy to get around, because of course it is.

The article adds that the law

[allows] the state attorney general to decide what is considered “harmful material” online and punish content creators with huge fines if their age verification process is flawed or non-existent.

Well isn't that simply arbitrary as fuck? The lawsuit says the legislation is "murky" and open-ended, not to mention unconstitutional.

“The statute is incredibly vague,” plaintiff attorney Jeff Sandman told Gambit. “There are terms of ‘art’ in here that are undefined. A trained attorney can’t make heads or tails of this."

Sandman also says the definition of “harmful material” is broad and fluid, and that kids’ internet access should be decided on by parents, not the government.

Under the whim of a far-right attorney general like Jeff Landry, the law if upheld could prevent teenagers from learning about their own adolescence and accessing sex education materials, and punish experts who share scientific knowledge about those topics online.

But aren't arbitrary standards what a good moral panic is all about? Heck, if you went by standards like the Supreme Court's rulings on "obscenity," then states wouldn't hardly be able to ban anything, and that's just not fair to Republicans who want to protect the hypothetical children, while real 14-year-olds are the only ones who know how to fix Dad's Pornhub account anyway. (Who the fuck has an "account" anyway?)

Be ready for suits in Utah, Texas, and all the other copycatting "religious" red states, which are all the highest porners anyway, because obviously.

OPEN THREAD! (sorry, forgot to say that at first)

[ NOLA.com ]

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