AUSTIN, Texas — The leader of the American Principles Project (APP), a well-funded, anti-porn conservative lobby, said Wednesday that the ultimate aim of the age verification laws currently being passed in various states is to create a private right of action, so that parents could directly sue online companies if their children are able to access adult content.
The APP’s Terry Schilling told right-wing news site the Daily Caller that he considers the entire adult industry to be “very dishonest.”
“So the real issue with leaving it all up to the state agencies is that it’s technically in their discretion,” Schilling told the Tucker Carlson-founded outlet. “The way to strengthen these laws is to not take away power from the agencies to enforce these laws, but to give additional power to parents to sue these companies, if and when they find porn from their production studios or websites on their children’s devices, or when they find that someone in their family has looked at this stuff.”
Schilling’s strategy mirrors the so-called “bounty hunter” strategies used against abortion seekers and providers in some states, where civil liability has been created to bypass civil rights and free speech protections.
As XBIZ reported, Schilling has been unusually candid during this election cycle about the conservative effort to outlaw all content his group considers “pornography.”
Last year, Schilling bragged that his group was behind the current Republican-led book-banning movement, and that his goal was to purge what he calls “pornography” from libraries.
In July, Schilling took credit for the current slew of age verification laws passed in recent months by several states, and admitted they were experiments so that the next Republican U.S. attorney general can prosecute anyone uploading adult content that could be accessed by a minor.
“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 told Fox News.