Indiana Advances AV Proposal; Kentucky Brings Similar Bills

FRANKFORT, Ky./INDIANAPOLIS—As age verification legislation persists throughout much of the conservative United States and in local settings, far-right Republican state lawmakers in two states controlled by the GOP are spewing very similar talking points.  AVN reported on Sen. Mike Bohacek of Michiana Shores, Ind., introducing Preliminary Draft 3021, which became Senate Bill 17. Senate Bill 17 was introduced with criminal penalties, like a felony, if a regulated web platform doesn't provide age verification. The bill was amended to remove the criminal penalties component, and on Tuesday passed through the Indiana House of Represenatives on a vote of 91 to 1. WTHI-TV 10, based in Terre Haute, reports that the bill requires adult-oriented sites to add age verification using state government-issued ID cards. In Kentucky, lawmakers are pushing age verification by relying on the debunked "public health" crisis messaging against porn. The Lexington Herald-Leader reported on a pair of matching bills in both chambers of the Kentucky state legislature. House Bill 241 and Senate Bill 276 are identical, and feature language similar to other age verification proposals throughout the United States. Both bills apply requirements on adult platforms for "reasonable" age verification measures to be adopted from such vendors. “We need to make sure we can put some provisions in place where kids can be safe online, and even if that one measure of having to verify their age helps, I think it’s worth doing,” Republican state Sen. Lindsey Tichenor told the Herald-Leader. Reporter Tessa Duvall paraphrased Tichenor in the story as underscoring the need for this legislation with the argument that "porn addiction can lead to 'a very, very dark road.'" Such an argument is not only extremely vague, it's also specious, given that "porn addiction" is not recognized as a real disorder, according to the American Psychological Association and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Both bills reportedly feature language invoking the pseudo-scientific framing of porn as the cause of "a public health crisis" that has "a corroding influence on minors” and “may lead to low self-esteem, body image disorders, an increase in problematic sexual activity at younger ages, and increased desire among adolescents to engage in risky sexual behavior.” In early 2020, public health clinicians and academics argued that declaring pornography as a public health crisis is both spurious and disingenuous.  "The movement to declare pornography a public health crisis is rooted in an ideology that is antithetical to many core values of public health promotion and is a political stunt, not reflective of [the] best available evidence,” writes Kimberly M. Nelson, assistant professor of community health sciences, and Emily F. Rothman, professor of community health sciences, at Boston University. The two Kentucky bills are subject to committee review and could advance as a consolidated measure.