The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
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It stalled quietly, almost anticlimactically — a pause button hit on a bill that was supposed to make noise. A Virginia House of Delegates subcommittee voted Monday to push off, until next year, a proposal that would slap a 10% tax on the gross receipts of adult websites doing business in the state.
The bill, HB 720, would apply that tax to revenue from adult sites “produced, sold, filmed, generated, or otherwise based” in Virginia — a definition broad enough to make even seasoned tax attorneys squint and reread it twice.
At a Finance subcommittee hearing, the bill’s sponsor, Delegate Eric Zehr, framed the measure as something more than just another line item in the tax code. While most proposed tax hikes, he said, tend to discourage businesses that “contribute in a positive way without societal detriment,” he argued that commercial adult sites fall into a different category altogether.
“They contribute to the mental health crisis straining our behavioral health system,” Zehr said. “Their profit is our loss.”
Under the proposal, money raised by the tax would flow into Virginia’s Behavioral Health and Developmental Services Trust Fund — a pool created to support care and treatment for people relying on public mental health, developmental, and substance abuse services.
“The purveyors of this content are profiting while the rest of us are paying,” Zehr argued. “Those profiting at the expense of our children need to pitch in.”
He also pointed to Virginia’s age verification law, passed in 2023, praising it as a step forward — but not nearly a final one. In his view, the law simply hasn’t gone far enough.
“This legislation would disincentivize these providers from further damaging our children’s mental health and development, and simultaneously help promote their mental health by increasing the income going into the Behavioral Health and Developmental Services Trust Fund,” Zehr told the subcommittee. “This isn’t simply an ideological attack. There is a direct connection, a direct line between this and what we’re paying for in the mental health system.”
Others in the room weren’t convinced. Subcommittee members raised red flags about constitutionality — concerns that legislative counsel tied to potential conflicts with freedom of speech — and about how the bill would work in practice, especially given the global, borderless nature of the adult industry.
Delegate Vivian Watts put it bluntly: “Trying to determine how we could enforce this, particularly as a tax matter, would be extraordinarily complicated.”
In the end, the subcommittee voted unanimously to carry the bill over until the 2027 legislative session, effectively shelving it for now.
As the gavel came down, Subcommittee Chair Phil Hernandez offered Zehr a parting note that sounded less like a rejection and more like a long pause: “We want to give you a chance to keep working on this.”
