TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A Republican state legislator in Florida, who is also a pastor, has introduced a copycat version of the age verification legislation being sponsored around the country by anti-porn religious conservative activists.
Rep. Chase Tramont (Central Florida), who was ordained in 2004 and serves as pastor at Oceanway Church, introduced HB 3 in the State House.
Tramont’s bill “would require entities that publish content harmful to minors to use third-party services to verify that the person attempting to view the content is an adult,” the Florida Phoenix reported.
The bill defines “harmful content” as “content that the average person applying contemporary community standards would find, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct; and lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors.”
The clergyman’s definition appears to be a variation on the Miller’s Test definition of obscenity, which follows the pro-censorship tradition of blurring the long-held distinction between First Amended-protected pornography and non-protected obscenity when it comes to minors, further complicated by deploying the vague, pseudo-medical term “harmful.”
As XBIZ reported, leading conservative anti-porn crusaders have admitted that the currently proliferating 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.
Industry Attorneys Weigh In
Industry attorney Lawrence Walters, whose Walters Law Group is based in Florida, told XBIZ that the state is “jumping into the age verification game with copycat legislation that is ultimately doomed to failure.”
Walters noted that, unlike some other recent state age verification laws, “violations detailed in HB 3 can be enforced by the state — in addition to civil lawsuits by or on behalf of minors.”
If passed, Walters explained, the law can be “quickly challenged as a violation of both the First Amendment and the dormant Commerce Clause, and on the grounds of Section 230 preemption. Legal precedent finding similar laws unconstitutional is well established. Should Florida pass this law, it will lead to litigation that will waste taxpayer dollars.”
Floridians, Walters concluded, “should be trusted to care for their own minor children by installing age-appropriate content restriction tools without the need for the government to act as a nanny state.”
Fellow attorney Corey Silverstein of Silverstein Legal told XBIZ he is "actually surprised it took Florida this long to jump on the age verification bandwagon, given their historically conservative nature. Nonetheless, Florida decided to give itself some enforcement powers instead of just creating private causes of action, leaving itself open to swift legal challenges. As I have commented previously, I believe that these age verification laws are ridiculous and unconstitutional, and the lawmakers passing them seem to ignore legal precedent and the First Amendment altogether."
Unfortunately, he added, "it seems as though the adult industry is going to have to wait for some successful outcomes in the Courts before this current age verification push ends.”