HELENA, Mont. — Montana’s version of the copycat age verification legislation being promoted by religious conservatives around the country went into effect this week.
Unlike AV measures in other states, which were all sponsored by Republican state legislators, Montana’s SB 544 was introduced by Democratic state Senator Willis Curdy (Missoula).
The bill passed with majorities in both chambers, 47 to 3 in the Senate and 84 to 13 in the House, and went into effect Monday.
Sen. Curdy’s version of the law includes some of the most extreme, controversial anti-porn talking points and myths, including asserting that pornography “is creating a public health crisis and having a corroding influence on minors”; that it “contributes to the hypersexualization of teens and prepubescent children and may lead to low self-esteem, body image disorders, an increase in problematic sexual activity at younger ages, and increased desire among adolescents to engage in risky sexual behavior”; and that it “may also impact brain development and functioning, contribute to emotional and medical illnesses, shape deviant sexual arousal, and lead to difficulty in forming or maintaining positive, intimate relationships, as well as promoting problematic or harmful sexual behaviors and addiction.”
SB 544 requires “pornographic websites” — including websites vaguely defined as containing a "substantial" amount of adult material — to verify a viewer’s age by “reasonable age verification methods.” According to local news station KRTV, these may include a government-issued ID or “any commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data” to verify age.
Pornhub disabled access to its site in Montana last week, stating, “While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.”
Montana now joins Utah, North Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi and Arkansas as states that have implemented copycat laws since a religiously inspired Republican politician introduced the first such measure in Louisiana in 2022.
As XBIZ reported, leading conservative anti-porn crusaders have admitted that the state-by-state age verification laws are merely a stepping stone in an organized effort to ban all adult content online and revive obscenity prosecutions.
Inset Image: Montana state senator Willis Curdy (D-Missoula)