Adult entertainment industry sues again over law requiring pornographic sites to verify users' ages
Adult entertainment industry sues again over law requiring pornographic sites to verify users' ages
An Indiana law that requires porn websites to verify users’ ages is being challenged by an association of the adult entertainment industry in federal court.
An Indiana law that requires pornographic websites to verify users’ ages — one of numerous such statutes in effect across the country — is being challenged by an association of the adult entertainment industry.
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request by the same group, the Free Speech Coalition, to block a similar law in Texas.
According to the Indiana law signed by Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb in March, the state’s attorney general and individuals can bring legal action against a website’s operator if material “harmful to minors” is accessible to users under the age of 18.
In addition to Indiana and Texas, similar laws have been enacted in Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, Utah and Virginia. Backers of such laws say they protect children from widespread pornography online, while opponents say the laws are vague and raise privacy concerns.
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Has there every actually been a moral panic that helped society? Can we just stop with that and let people live their lives?
Upton Sinclair's the Jungle?
charles dickens books?
uncle tom's cabin?
A moral panic is when people freak out because they're scared for the nation's morals or values. The Jungle made people, rightfully, freak out about their health (whether that was the intention or not). I don't think it qualifies as a moral panic.
people freak out because they’re scared for the nation’s morals or values
I would consider the labor conditions depicted in The Jungle, The Pearl, Of Mice And Men, and Grapes of Wrath worthy of a national moral panic.
Worthy, sure. I just mean that what actually happened with The Jungle was people focused on how gross meat packing facilities were. The working conditions were treated as kind of a secondary, less important issue.
Which amusingly, still wasn't the intent of the book.
If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.
Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
Has there every actually been a moral panic that helped society?
The concern we had over the depleted ooze layer and lead contamination in paint and gasoline was nice.