SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Both Republicans and Democrats in the California Assembly’s Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee voted last week to move forward a version of the age verification bills being sponsored around the country by anti-porn religious conservative activists.
As the Sacramento Bee explained on Tuesday, members of both parties “sided with conservative religious organizations against LGBTQ, reproductive health and civil liberty advocacy groups and voted unanimously in favor of AB 3080, a bill by Assemblyman Juan Alanis (R-Modesto) that would require pornographic websites ‘to take reasonable steps to ensure’ that only adults are looking at them.”
The state capital’s paper of record also noted that AB 3080 is backed by Exodus Cry, the California Catholic Conference, California Family Council, Concerned Women for America, Family Policy Alliance, the Pacific Justice Institute Center for Public Policy and other conservative groups, both religious and secular.
As XBIZ reported, Free Speech Coalition (FSC) Executive Director Alison Boden testified last week against AB 3080, describing it as “a terribly flawed bill that never should have advanced out of committee, especially not one focused on consumer privacy.”
FSC was also mentioned by the Sacramento Bee as one of the groups urging California legislators to reject the bill, a roster which also includes Advocates for Youth, Center for LGBTQ Economic Advancement and Research, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), GLSEN, National Abortion Federation, Netchoice and Reproaction.
“Age verification laws don’t just impact young people,” EFF warned through a statement. “It’s necessary to confirm the ages of all website visitors. It is a significant privacy violation to require all people to submit either their official government-issued identification credentials, or to delve into their transactional history — including ‘bank account information’ — to attempt to determine their age, particularly if that person is an adult for whom there are no restrictions to view such material.”
If AB 3080 becomes law, the Sacramento Bee’s Andrew Sheeler wrote, California “would join a host of red states, including Texas, in requiring online age verification for porn. When Texas passed its version of the law, online porn giant Pornhub announced that it would no longer accept web traffic from that state. Could that happen in California next?”