Not that long ago, I attended a small gathering where a diocesan representative spoke about child protection efforts.

“Your child doesn’t have to be looking for porn. Porn is looking for your child,” he told the speechless audience of parents with school-age children. Fortunately, a growing number of states have passed age-verification laws to shield under-age eyes.

On Wednesday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a two-hour oral argument in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the porn industry’s objection to Texas’ age-verification law.

Don’t let the name of the petitioners’ group confuse you. This case has little to do with free speech and everything to do with money. The Free Speech Coalition is a trade group representing the $100-billion “adult entertainment industry.” The group claims the law violates the First Amendment’s free-speech guarantee for adults by discouraging access to pornographic content.

Give me a break.

The Texas law does not prevent adults from accessing porn. It merely requires websites with more than one-third of their content classified as “sexual material harmful to minors” to verify that users are adults before they can access the material. To satisfy the mandate, covered sites must implement “reasonable age-verification methods” to confirm that users are at least 18, and display warnings labeling their content as harmful to health.

Counsel for purveyors of porn, none other than the Americans for Civil Liberties Union, suggested during argument that kids are sufficiently protected when parents use content-filtering software.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a mother of seven, was quick to observe, “Kids can get online porn through gaming systems, tablets, phones, computers. Let me just say that content filtering for all those different devices, I can say from personal experience, is difficult to keep up with.”

She added, “I think that the explosion of addiction to online porn has shown that content filtering isn’t working.”

Her colleague, Justice Samuel Alito, had a similar reaction. “Do you know a lot of parents who are more tech-savvy than their 15-year-old children? C’mon. Be real.”

Yes. It’s time to be real here. Trying to keep your kids from being exposed to online pornography is one of the greatest parenting challenges today.

Researchers at the Institute for Family Studies recently highlighted some shocking statistics: 93% of boys and 63% of girls report being exposed to internet pornography before the age of 18, with the average age of first exposure being 12 years old. They continue with the following chilling observations: Early exposure to pornography is connected to a whole host of “negative developmental outcomes” including “a greater acceptance of sexual harassment, sexual activity at an early age, acceptance of negative attitudes to women, unrealistic expectations, skewed attitudes of gender roles, greater levels of body dissatisfaction, rape myths (responsibility for sexual assault to a female victim), and sexual aggression.”

Before the Texas law could even go into effect, the Free Speech Coalition sued.

In the summer of 2023, a federal district court issued an order that temporarily barred Texas from putting the law into effect. By requiring adults to submit personal data to access the sites, reasoned U.S. District Judge David Ezra, lawful access would be discouraged over concerns about identity theft and extortion.

“People will be particularly concerned about accessing controversial speech when the state government can log and track that access.”

Ezra also focused on the similarity between the Texas law and the Child Online Protection Act, a federal law that the Supreme Court held was likely unconstitutional in Ashcroft v. ACLU (2004).

It was a short-lived order.

Two judges of a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit reversed. While noting that the Texas law is “very similar” to the Child Online Protection Act reviewed by the Court in Ashcroft, the majority noted that the government had not disputed an important issue: the standard of review to be applied. Rather than apply strict scrutiny, which requires the government to show that a law serves a compelling government interest and is narrowly drawn to advance that interest, as was done by the Court in Ashcroft, the majority concluded that a more deferential standard of review known as “rational basis” review was appropriate. That standard requires simply that a law further a legitimate state interest and that there be a rational connection between that interest and the law.

The panel’s majority was guided by a different Supreme Court case, Ginsberg v. New York (1968). Applying rational-basis review, the Court upheld a New York law that criminalized the sale of “girlie” magazines to children. Quoting Ginsberg, the majority reasoned that “the State has an interest in protecting the welfare of children and to see that they are safeguarded from abuses. For that reason, regulations of the distribution of minors of materials obscene for minors are subject only to rational-basis review.”

The Biden administration is participating in the Supreme Court’s review of the law as a “friend of the court” and shared argument time on Wednesday. The administration agrees with the Coalition that the Texas law should be subjected to strict scrutiny and recommends that the Court send the matter back to the Fifth Circuit — all but dooming the law.

Perhaps in a clumsy attempt to distance itself from the porn industry, the administration recommends that the Court should “make clear that the First Amendment does not prohibit Congress and the States from adopting appropriately tailored measures to prevent children from accessing harmful sexual material on the Internet.”

We should applaud Texas and other states for enacting sensible age-verification standards. At the same time, even these laws are not enough. Last year, Pornhub, one of the largest adult content websites, shut down services in Texas rather than pay to implement age-verification measures. It did the same at the beginning of this year in Florida.

Almost instantly, online work-arounds appeared that guide prospective visitors from both states to the site. No content filter, age-verification requirement, or even the voluntary departure of sites from your state is a guarantee that young eyes will be safe from pornography. After all, as the head of child protection in my diocese explained: “Your child doesn’t have to be looking for porn. Porn is looking for your child.”