New Utah Law Will Force Porn Providers to Include a Warning Label about Dangers to Children
Shane Trejo
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A new Utah law that will force internet pornographers and other adult content providers to provide a warning label with their smut will go into effect, despite the objections of the adult entertainment industry.
Utah Governor Gary Herbert has allowed the measure to become law without his signature. Under the new law, pornographers who fail to provide a simple, one-sentence warning about the dangers that porn causes to minors will be subject to a $2,500 penalty per violation of the statute.
Republican sponsor Rep. Brady Brammer said he helped draft the legislation to raise awareness of the dangers of porn as it proliferates ubiquitously due to the internet, with children often being able to access hardcore content at the youngest of ages.
“We continue to have people complain about the prevalence of obscene materials and the impact on their children,” Brammer said about his law.
“It’s not censorship because it doesn’t stop anything from being said or printed or published,” he added.
The Free Speech Coalition (FSC), a trade organization that represents various smut-peddling organizations, disagrees with Brammer’s assessment of the law. The FSC believes that the law is unconstitutional and will likely be overturned by the courts.
“This is the government coming in and trying to control something that should be handled by parents,” said Mike Stabile, an FSC spokesman.
Utah declared pornography a public health crisis with a resolution approved in 2016, and more than a dozen states have followed suit in the years since. While advocates frame pornography as freedom of expression, recent revelations in the porn business have shown its predatory nature.
A top worldwide provider of streaming pornographic videos, PornHub has either wittingly or unwittingly allowed videos of child rape to proliferate on their massive platform:
One of the largest purveyors of pornography on the internet has found itself at the center of intense scrutiny, its content under the microscope for publishing and promoting films depicting sex trafficking as well as the rape of minors.
The heinous content is so pervasive — and the bare-minimum effort to stop it put forth by the owners of the website is so futile — one activist, Laila Mickelwait, is calling for the entire company, MindGeek, to be shut down…
Mickelwait, director of abolition for Exodus Cry, an advocacy organization focused on ending sexual exploitation and sex trafficking, is making the case for the website’s termination after a man from Fort Lauderdale was arrested last fall, when authorities discovered nearly 60 explicit videos of a missing, underage teenager on the pornographic site. If that isn’t enough, there is also a recent case involving 22 women who were deceived and coerced by pornographer Michael Pratt into performing sexual acts for videos that were then uploaded to the smut site. According to a federal indictment, Pratt, a wanted fugitive, produced child pornography and sexually trafficked a minor. And if that still isn’t enough, a recent investigation by Vice into Pratt’s enterprise found that the porn site’s leaders simply don’t care that their outlet hosts illegal content…
Drawing in north of 110 million visitors every single day, the porn site in question is “making money off of the exploitation, rape, and trafficking of hundreds if not thousands of women and girls who are victims, and their crime scenes are being hosted on their website,” Mickelwait told Faithwire.
“They’re profiting off of those crime scenes,” she continued. “I think it’s something that we’ve known all along, but right now, we have evidence of what is actually taking place.”
Utah’s law represents some initial push back against an all-pervasive industry that is poisoning Western culture.
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