Terry Schilling, president of the conservative non-profit organization American Principles Project (APP), spoke with Fox News Digital on states moving forward on laws requiring pornography sites to verify the age of their users.
In June, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, R., signed into law a bill that mandates "reasonable age verification methods" for pornography sites while imposing civil penalties on entities allowing minors under 18 to access obscene material through the internet or social media.
Through this law, Texas became the seventh state to impose age verification laws on pornography sites, an accomplishment that Schilling celebrated.
"Texas was the crown jewel for us. It was the biggest state that we had. And there's 7.5 million kids in Texas, so it was a really important fight. But we started working and building a coalition several years ago, and we were literally meeting with any pro-family groups, any pro-family activists across the country that would do that," Schilling said.
He praised these legislative wins, however, the APP president said it was already illegal across all 50 states to deliver obscenity to anyone under 18 under federal law. The issue, Schilling stated, was enforcement.
"The real issue is that these laws at the federal level have not been enforced. And so what we wanted to do was build momentum at the state level, show that it can be done, use the laboratories of democracy, and then build up momentum to get the next attorney general of the United States to actually enforce these laws and require these companies to verify that these are actually adults, not children, that are viewing this obscene material," Schilling said.
In response to age verification laws, Pornhub, under its parent company MindGeek, announced that it would shut access to users in Utah, Mississippi, and Virginia. Schilling commented that the pornography website’s actions could actually benefit their cause in the long run.
"What they're betting on is that they'll be able to create such an uproar by people that watch porn," he said.
Schilling continued, "They're making the wrong bet because what's going to end up happening is these people that can't get access to porn, they're going to be a lot happier, and they're going to realize that this was something that was not that great in their life and move on and hopefully find a partner and a spouse to be intimate with instead of a computer screen."
He said that similar age verification standards are already imposed on online alcohol or tobacco sales as well as sports betting websites.
"That's actually one of the places where we got the idea was we noticed that sports betting websites would make you upload your photo ID [to] verify your age and even location. And so we thought if they can do this with gambling online, they should be able to do this with obscene content online," Schilling said..
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Similar laws and restrictions have been passed in Arkansas and Montana, though Schilling says the work is far from over.
"We'd really like to get Florida done. We'd like to do something in Georgia. Ohio would be great… We've got it done in seven states right now. So, we have 43 more to go," Schilling said.
