Gov. Jim Pillen arrives to give his closing remarks at the Capitol in April. Pillen on Thursday celebrated that news that Pornhub plans to go dark in Nebraska next month when the state’s new age verification law takes effect.JUSTIN WAN, Journal Star

Andrew Wegley – Jun 20, 2024 – Lincoln Journal Star

My cmnt: The Leftist-leaning LJS (lying on its left side like a tipped cow) and its democrat allies s/b happy about this – as are most Nebraskans with any moral sense – but of course they are not. ALL sexual activity must be allowed, championed and accepted – whether cutting off the breasts of young girls or genitals of young boys in the name of diversity and transgenderism, abortion at any time and up to full-term delivery, allowing porn in school libraries, or any other perversity you probably haven’t even heard of yet.

My cmnt: The Lib-Left democrats always claim to be pro-woman and pro-child yet they act as if porn is just women, girls and boys having fun. Nothing could be further from the truth. Almost all porn is produced by men using vulnerable illegal aliens, run-a-ways, abuse victims and kidnapped boys and girls. It is wicked and vile what democrats do to women and children. Porn does not just harm the victims forced to produce it but also the young minds that become addicted to it.

My cmnt: Of course you can never get completely rid of anything that feeds the baser appetites of men – gambling, sex traffic, slavery, porn, lying, cheating, stealing or murder. Almost all sex and violence is for men. Raising young men to respect and honor women and to control their baser instincts is what civilization is all about. It is NOT being prudish to try to control evil. But democrats have been the proponents of slavery, Jim Crow Laws, discrimination, pornography, welfare plantations, and cheating at elections since the country was founded.

Aloy — which also operates porn sites including Brazzers, Reality Kings and Men.com, according to its website — has pointed to the provisions in age verification laws requiring porn sites to collect personal information that could put users’ privacy at risk while not actually preventing minors from seeing explicit content.

Championed by Sen. Dave Murman of Glenvill in the Legislature this year, the law requires porn websites, or third-party companies they contract, to verify that users attempting to access the sites are at least 18 years old through a “reasonable age verification method,” which could include a photo ID or driver’s license or other documentation — such as a credit card statement — that could serve as “a reliable proxy for age.”

The law bars websites or third-party contractors from retaining users’ personal information and would allow users or their parents the right to sue adult websites that do not comply with the law. The age verification requirement applies only to websites where “more than one-third of the total material” published is “harmful.”

The law doesn’t tab a state agency to monitor compliance, putting that power into the hands of consumers who could file civil lawsuits against companies that run afoul of the law.

The legislation closely mirrors laws passed in eight other states over the past two years after Louisiana in 2022 became the first state to require porn sites to verify the age of users.

Nebraska lawmakers knew when they sent the bill to Pillen’s desk on 35-3 vote in April that Pornhub would likely pull out of the state.

Aloy had already blocked access to its sites in seven of the eight states that enacted age verification laws prior to this year. The company announced this week it would cease operations in five more states — including Nebraska — over similar laws. And the company pulled out of Texas last week.

“The Pornhub has actually pulled out, I think I’m correct in saying, it’s pulled out of seven states now that have passed this bill,” Murman said as lawmakers debated his bill in March. “So, apparently, it’s working.”

As he advocated for his bill in the Legislature, Murman pointed to academic research that has linked porn consumption to increased rates of depression, anxiety, violent behavior, a distorted view of relationships between men and women, among other negative emotional, psychological and physical health outcomes.

The bill’s opponents, meanwhile, broadly cast Murman’s proposal as a well-intended but ineffective route forward, highlighting widely accessible means of circumventing age verification tools while raising questions over privacy, government overreach and how the state might police compliance.

Sen. Carol Blood of Bellevue and other opponents noted that teens or even grade-schoolers could utilize free virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access porn sites in Nebraska after the law takes effect.

Data published by Google shows that over the last 90 days, internet searches for VPNs ticked up in Nebraska in mid-April, when lawmakers passed the bill, and again this month, when Pornhub began warning users that they would soon be required to verify their identities to access porn sites in the state.

The recent spikes are not outliers when compared to five-year search trends, the data shows.

The law’s opponents had warned that passing Murman’s bill would be “problematic” if doing so would “act effectively as a ban” on pornography.

“It has resulted in these companies pulling out of these states, which sounds great,” Sen. John Cavanaugh of Omaha said in March. “You’re like, ‘Oh, well, the smut peddlers are gone.’

“But the problem with freedom of speech (and) expression is that we have to protect everyone’s right to speak and to express themselves — even the ones we don’t like.”

But on Thursday, as Pornhub plotted its exit from the state, Nebraska’s governor celebrated.

“This is a great development for the protection of our kids, culture and values,” Pillen said. “Our kids already face too many threats from Big Tech and the obscene content industry. Having one fewer outlet trying to sexualize their childhood is a good thing for their futures and a good thing for Nebraska.”