LOS ANGELES — Two years into the religiously-inspired crusade to ban free access to adult material in the U.S. through carefully drafted “age verification” legislation, the constant onslaught of state-by-state proposals and laws — many of them copied from each other — can be hard to follow.

Every week — sometimes every day — a new item concerning one state or another makes the news cycle, with a frequency that may desensitize not only readers, but even the journalists tasked with covering the seemingly endless barrage of legislative and judicial developments — a bill is introduced in one state the same day another state’s bill moves out of committee, and yet another’s is signed into law, or challenged in court as unconstitutional.

The reason? These copycat age verification bills have mushroomed around the country ever since Louisiana Rep. Laurie Schlegel, an obscure faith-based therapist and local Republican politician, introduced HB 142 in early 2022. Schlegel’s measure was the first successful test balloon by the religious right on how to reach their aim of a total porn ban, after their earlier attempt to manufacture a “public health crisis” around sexual content floundered during the actual health crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

To try to make sense of the overall situation and provide a bird’s-eye-view of the fight for free speech and against these controversial laws — which have already resulted in several millions of American adults not being able to freely access Pornhub due to the liability their wording creates — XBIZ spoke this week to Mike Stabile, Director of Public Affairs at Free Speech Coalition (FSC).

As the adult industry’s trade group, FSC has been at the forefront of the fight against these age verification bills. For the last few years, Stabile has become a reliable, ceaselessly committed voice of reason against censorship, speaking before state legislatures, engaging with the — often misinformed — mainstream press and through his influential X.com account.

XBIZ: What would you say are the main takeaways of the Age Verification fight if we take a snapshot in late April 2024?

Mike Stabile: We’re seeing the country divided into states with free, open internet, and states with increasing limits on citizens’ First Amendment rights.

Faith-based groups are using anxiety around porn to force through what are essentially surveillance measures. They’re quite open about their goals: the groups pushing these bills see age-verification as a stepping stone to banning porn entirely.

Adult content is the canary in the coal mine of free speech, and has been for decades. As soon as these laws started to pass, they started to bring them against all types of disfavored speech. If we don’t stop them now, I think we are looking forward in a few years to a fairly closed internet, and an adult industry that’s at least partly underground.

XBIZ: Are there any recent precedents for such an orchestrated campaign?

Stabile: The road map to banning porn is quite similar to what was done with reproductive rights. They want to make it legally risky to sell or consume, so they are creating onerous regulations that are ever more difficult to comply with. And they are hoping, at some point, to reverse decades of legal precedent. But in the meantime, they want to put as many people out of business as possible.

XBIZ: What does a map of the U.S. look like as of now in terms of the number of states where bills have been introduced, or laws passed, or have gone into effect?

Stabile: Pretty much the entire American South has now eliminated access to a free internet. They’ve created tremendous liability for both those who create adult content and those who access it. At the start of this year, nine states had instituted age-verification laws. If you look at the FSC tracker, now we’re up to 20.

XBIZ: The ongoing, religiously inspired age verification crusade began with a Louisiana bill signed into law in June 2022, which became effective on Jan. 1, 2023. What happened in its aftermath?

Stabile: When Louisiana passed its law, they trumpeted it as constitutional and effective. It was neither, but through clever marketing, they sold it that way to other legislators — many of whom have and had no idea about what the law contained.

We’ve been in hearings where bill sponsors couldn’t answer basic questions about their bills. But that doesn’t matter all that much: it’s a culture war issue.

The bill language was quickly picked up in other legislatures, many of whom had already passed the pseudoscientific “Porn is a Public Health Crisis” resolutions a few years earlier. In heavily conservative areas, it was an easy pass — and the bill had little opposition outside FSC, so it was politically difficult for even Democrats to vote against. Legislators just weren’t hearing what was wrong with the bill.

We filed suit in Utah, Texas and Louisiana, but so far, most of the fight has been over whether the law can be enforced while the constitutionality is decided.

What that did do, however, was make people aware that the constitutionality was dubious. I can’t tell you the number of hearings we’ve been in where they assume that there are no constitutional issues. It still happens, but we have more resources this year and have brought bigger allies to the fight.

XBIZ: How is FSC better prepared for this fight now?

Stabile: When the Louisiana law passed, we didn’t have boots on the ground. We’d monitored the bill, and had spoken out in the press about it there and in Utah, and we’d contacted legislators, but we didn’t have the resources to fly out and testify.

FSC had not historically been active at the state level, except in California, because we haven’t had the funding. Even now, there are just two people working on this at FSC, me and Executive Director Alison Boden. I’m part time and Alison has to run the entire organization — financial discrimination, trade shows, staffing. If you compare us to any other trade or advocacy organization, we do a hell of a lot on comparatively little.

Thankfully, over the past year, we started to see our members take this more seriously. Nobody wants kids to be able to access adult content, but these bills are effectively censorship. The cost of age-verification alone makes it impossible to comply and operate a business, and consumer compliance drops 90% or more when you ask them to present ID. Meanwhile, you have thousands of sites overseas — pirate sites, sites with no identifiable address or owner — that ignore these state mandates completely.

We now have more resources than we had last year, and we’re able, for instance, to fly to Arizona and testify in hearings, which really does make a difference. We’re able to meet with allies in tech and civil liberties, we’re able to spend time funding reports and data that bolster our case. And we can bring court challenges, which are tremendously expensive. We absolutely could not do that without members.

XBIZ: How is FSC tackling coordination with other organizations fighting online censorship?

Stabile: We have spent a lot of time and energy educating our allies, and getting them to write letters and attend hearings. ACLU, FIRE, EFF, CDT, Media Coalition, TechFreedom, Chamber of Progress, NetChoice, Woodhull Foundation and others. These groups really help us make the case to legislators that this is about more than adult content — it’s about the future of the internet.

Woodhull Foundation, for example, has been aggressive about bringing on groups that speak to the danger of these laws beyond adult, groups like SIECUS, which represents sex educators, as well as LGBTQ+ groups, reproductive rights groups and other groups that could be targeted as “material harmful to minors.”

XBIZ: What’s the status report on FSC’s overall fight for free speech?

Stabile: A year later, we’re much stronger than we were. Unfortunately, a lot of these bills still passed. But a significant number were defeated as well.

XBIZ: The “age verification of adult content” laws are universally introduced by Republicans, and overwhelmingly by religiously inspired conservative legislators, some of which — as in Florida — are literally members of the clergy. But throughout the country, Democrats have also gotten on board, usually trumpeting their pro-censorship votes as a positively example of “bipartisanship.” What has been your experience speaking to legislators on both sides of the proverbial aisle?

Stabile: There’s been a fair amount of propaganda from the proponents of these bills that their legislation is bipartisan, which it’s not. Make no mistake, these bills are being drafted and advanced by conservative, faith anti-LGBTQ+ groups and introduced by conservative legislators.

Unfortunately, in a moral panic over tech and sex, it can be hard to vote against them, and I think what we saw originally — when there was no real opposition — was that these bills seemed to make sense on their face.

You have to understand that most of the state legislators are part-timers. Most of them are business people, or people in the community, who spend anywhere from six weeks to a few months actively legislating. They’re not always subject-matter experts on tech or constitutional issues. So when someone presents a bill that says, “Oh, this is just the same as flashing an ID at a gas station!” it seems perfectly plausible to them. Especially where there’s no opposition.

You also have people on the left who look at the bill, or the vote, especially in states with Republican supermajorities where they say, “This bill is going to pass no matter what I do” — it’s red meat for a red base. And if they vote against it, that is going to be used against them, maybe cost them their seat in a tight race.

So I think some make the decision to keep their powder and live to fight another day on something where they can have a real effect.

XBIZ: How is the FSC adapting to address the problem of — often poorly informed — lawmakers voting for these controversial bills?

Stabile: And a lot of these bills move really fast. What we saw this year is that proponents really flooded the zone with bills, which means that you have to prioritize where you can fight.

We’ve sent letters to everyone voting on one of these bills, but you try to focus resources on states where you’ll have an effect. When we’ve had a chance to make the case, when we’ve been able to bring in allies, we’ve had more success.

We got a veto in Arizona, which was a huge victory. Gov. Hobbs really took a stand — one that will be used against her. And in Kansas, despite a Republican supermajority, the Democratic Governor refused to sign the bill. It goes into effect regardless, but even with a veto they would have overridden it.

XBIZ: Why are those wins — or at least non-losses — important?

Stabile: Most of the places where these bills have passed have been deeply, deeply red. Arizona and Kansas have Republican legislatures, but Democratic governors. And in those cases, we say that Democratic legislators stood up. They by and large voted against the bill when it came before them, giving the Governors reason not to sign it. We had allies really go to bat for us in these states as well. I think it’s a recipe for how to fight these bills in other states.

XBIZ: You have said that the Tennessee version of the age verification legislation is a particularly bad bill. Why?

Stabile: Tennessee is a particularly bad bill because it adds a criminal charge to distributing adult content online — it’s a felony if you don’t age-verify every visitor. It also requires visitors to be re-verified every hour, and allows the database to keep the records for thirty days. It is just a grossly unconstitutional, dangerous bill.

There’s a similar one in Ohio, and one in Alabama that essentially adds a tax. All outrageously unconstitutional bad bills meant to crush legal speech. But if they’re not challenged, they will go into effect.

I think a lot of people in our industry assume someone else will fight this, and it’s just not true. We have allies, but they’re overstretched as well. They’ll support us, and they’ll fight alongside us, but we have to lead. And if we don’t, the people who are going to end up fighting this are the people who are prosecuted.

XBIZ: Is there a sense, now that all (or most) of the red states and even the so-called purple states have been painted the pro-censorship color on the map, that the religious conservative crusaders have already moved into blue territory — California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, etc. — perhaps with a less faith-based approach?

Stabile: They have been introducing these bills in blue states all along, but they generally haven’t gotten very far — Illinois, Delaware, Michigan and New Mexico, for example. I think that it’s been a lot easier for us to make the case in those states that this is backdoor censorship, that this is essentially faith-based anti-porn and anti-LGBTQ+ censorship coming under the guise of child protection. When they see that ACLU and EFF and FIRE are opposed, it’s easier to have the conversation, and the bill dies.

Even in those states, the bills are almost always being introduced by a conservative legislator, often one who has been harassed by one of these anti-porn groups into advancing the bill. And these proponents have a sweet tongue — they portray these as easy victories, electoral and moral victories.

I can’t tell you the number of legislators, even in progressive states, who weren’t aware that there was opposition until FSC showed up.

Many of these states have their own peculiar dynamics. Bills may pass out of committee with the knowledge that they’ll die on the floor, or never be brought to a vote. They’re designed to be politically toxic to oppose. But we have a lot of principled people who are fighting back and we’re rallying our allies to show up and fight back. These bills aren’t going to kill themselves.

XBIZ: And as of this month, they’ve breached California. Is that especially concerning, given the state’s iconic status as the adult production capital of the world?

Stabile: Anti-porn groups are definitely trying to make a stand in California. I suspect they want to show that they can win in a progressive state. The original bill was moribund, but was reformulated at the last minute, in hopes of fixing the constitutional issues. I think people were shocked when our Executive Director showed up at the hearing to oppose it. 

The California Assembly has its own political microclimates, but we’re working aggressively to stop the bill. We have a huge worker base here, although, as I said, censorship groups are trying to make a stand in the state, so we can’t rest — we need everyone to show up, to call their legislators, to make people understand what these bills really are.