BATON ROUGE, La. — A religious Louisiana legislator has proposed a new bill to allow state residents to sue any commercial entity for failing to implement age verification to prevent minors from accessing “content online that could be harmful to them, such as pornography."
If passed, it would be the first such state law in the U.S.
HB142 was introduced by Rep. Laurie Schlegel (R-Metairie), whose background before entering politics was as a faith-based couples’ counselor and “sex addiction therapist,” though the concept of “sex addiction” has been widely debunked by secular psychologists and therapists.
“The bill doesn’t force the companies to make the verification system, per se,” reported the local Baton Rouge Proud news site. “It does allow Louisianans to sue the companies for not having it. Adults would have to input their driver’s license or other state ID to prove they are over the age of 18.”
To back her claims about the supposed harms of “pornography” — a term whose legal definition remains notoriously vague — Schlegel quoted veteran anti-porn activist and former academic Gail Dines.
According to Baton Rouge Proud, Schlegel said that is not her intent for the bill to affect sites like Twitter or Netflix, which may include pornography, but rather that she aimed her bill at “commercial entities such as major porn sites that have over 30% of their content being harmful to kids.”
Schlegel also repeated the widely debunked Christian conservative talking point of a supposed “public health crisis” around porn, which was deployed by several Republican officials between 2016 and 2020. That rhetoric has largely been replaced by the “trafficking” panic — likely due in part to the COVID pandemic highlighting the absurdity of “porn epidemic” claims. But today Rep. Schlegel returned to the previous tactic, telling Baton Rouge Proud that “unlimited access to pornography on the internet is causing a public health crisis for our children.”
The bill passed out of the Louisiana House of Representatives Committee on Civil Law and Procedure without any opposition.
Main Image: Louisiana State Rep. Laurie Schlegel (R-Metairie)