Porn isn’t free speech — on the web or anywhere

Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project notes that the ­Supremes “did not strike down all obscenity laws in Reno v. ACLU.” Nor did they “overturn existing precedent recognizing the government’s interest in defending minors from both obscene and non-obscene ‘indecent’ material.”

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Which means it’s still possible to restrict access. Schilling suggests requiring Internet service providers to create opt-in systems, whereby the default version of the Web is porn-free, with adults permitted to request the unfiltered version. Another possibility: corralling all porn into an adult “zone” that requires age verification to enter, while banning it ­everywhere else.

Would any of this flout constitutional “originalism”? “Real originalists,” as Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule quipped recently, “uphold obscenity convictions ­under the common-law rule,” the broad definition that prevailed for most of the nation’s history: Obscenity is any material with a tendency to “deprave and corrupt the morals of those whose minds are open to such influence.”

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