The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
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One night around 30 years ago, I went out to a bar with some friends to shoot pool and have a few beers. It was a neighborhood bar I’d been to several dozen times without ever showing my ID, a transaction probably deemed unnecessary by the bartenders, who took one look at my quite full beard and rightly concluded it wasn’t something a person under 21 years of age could grow.
There was a new guy tending bar on that night, however, one who was perhaps feeling pressure to do everything “by the book” due to his newness. Whatever his reason, he demanded to see my ID. I duly produced my driver’s license – which the bartender noted had recently expired. Thus, he said, I couldn’t shoot pool or drink beer in his bar.
The assertion was incorrect, as one of the patrons seated at the bar helpfully noted. Normally, I wouldn’t put much stock in the legal opinion of a random bar patron, but this regular customer also happened to be an attorney – who represented the bar’s owner, among other local clients.
“The purpose of the law is to assure you don’t serve anyone who is underage,” the attorney explained to the bartender. “The ID might be expired, but that doesn’t mean his date of birth has changed. It’s not valid as a license to operate a vehicle, but for the purpose of identification, it’s just fine.”
The bartender wasn’t having it. He shooed me off the premises despite the attorney’s assurance he didn’t need to. Fortunately, back at home I had a current, valid passport, so in the time it took me to make the round-trip drive home, I was back at the pool table, with a beer in my hand. If I hadn’t possessed that passport, though, I’d have been stuck at home, thirsty and thoroughly miffed.
I’ve been thinking about that night a lot lately, in the context of age verification laws, not just within the United States, but especially here, because the U.S. is where I live – and because the protection of the First Amendment is something we like to believe sets us apart from much of the rest of the world.
We all know about countries that have fined adult websites for allegedly failing to comply with their age verification laws and about how these laws continue to proliferate around the country. What gets discussed a lot less are the people these laws leave behind – namely, adults who don’t possess identification.
I think a lot of people underestimate how many adults around the country and globe lack government-issued identification, not to mention lack empathy for people who find themselves in that predicament. Estimates vary greatly, but some researchers peg the number of American adults without government issued identification as high as 34.5 million. There are also many Americans with forms of identification that might be acceptable for some purposes, but not others, like Native American tribal IDs.
As noted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “age verification systems foster unequal access to information and provide an asymmetric solution to find essential information, build community, and weigh in on public discourse,” and as governments and companies “increasingly require users to prove their age before accessing online services, these individuals risk being excluded from large parts of the internet altogether.”
I’m sure many proponents of age verification laws won’t lose any sleep over the notion of adults being denied access to online porn, because for many of the legislators who advanced these bills, discouraging everyone from watching porn is the whole point, not merely a side benefit.
For those Americans among us who do care about little, trifling things like equality under the law, the right to access expression protected by the First Amendment and basic fairness, however, the de facto paywall created by age verification laws isn’t something we should dismiss as a minor issue. To the contrary, that paywall ought to be front and center among our objections to the laws which created it.
