SALT LAKE CITY — Utah newspaper Deseret News has published an interview with U.S. Senator Mike Lee, in which he champions ongoing efforts to limit access to adult content online in the name of fighting “porn addiction.”
The newspaper praised the Utah Republican for taking on “the pornography issue” at the federal level.
In the interview, Lee bemoans the fact that “the First Amendment and the case law developed around it” make it difficult to reduce the “footprint” of adult content.
“Over the last roughly 30 years, Congress has tried to do something about this to protect young people from the dangers associated with having free access over the internet to porn,” Lee says. “A lot of those laws that have been passed by Congress have ultimately been invalidated by the Supreme Court under one theory or another.”
Several courts, including SCOTUS, have found that attempts by Congress to censor free speech concerning sexuality are unconstitutional.
Lee told Deseret News that his SCREEN Act — a proposed federal age-verification law that would expand Utah’s anti-porn legislation, promoted by religious conservatives, to the entire United States — was drafted to fall in “the sweet spot” to “pass constitutional muster.”
“Under what’s known as the commercial speech doctrine, it gives more flexibility for government regulation, particularly for something like this, where there’s a legitimate, widely accepted public policy at issue,” Lee explained.
Lee identified the issue in question as a need for the U.S. government to “protect children who are uniquely vulnerable to the harms associated with pornography addiction.”
The notion of “porn addiction” has been widely debunked by health researchers.
Lee added it was easy for him to get Democrats behind his SCREEN Act because “it’s really hard for people to come out openly and oppose it.”
In the interview, Lee also promotes his PROTECT Act, which, as XBIZ reported, would effectively outlaw all sex work in the nation, including adult performance and content creation, by classifying any consent influenced by a person’s economic circumstances as coercive.
Lee added that his bills are an effective start to substantially reduce adult content online because, “The minute you start cracking down on this industry anywhere, I think it’s the minute that it gets easier to put a lot of these bad actors out of business.”