Protect children by rejecting special rights

Actual sex has been replaced by a cheap counterfeit that makes men depressed and leads to erectile dysfunction.

A number of outlets have written about the "sex recession," but Pastor Michael Foster posted a helpful chart. Back in 2008, only 8% of men under 30 reported zero sexual partners since turning 18. Today, that number is 27%. Good news, right? Men are saving themselves for marriage, right? Wrong.

Note that the spike begins in 2008, right when smartphones started to become widely adopted. The iPhone was introduced in 2007 and the first Android phone was introduced in 2008. Every technology that makes pornography easier to use anonymously is exploited by the porn industry. We saw this with the VCR, DVD and broadband internet. Now most of us carry a device in our pocket with unlimited access to the Internet.

Sexual immorality has not declined. Instead, actual sex has been replaced by a cheap counterfeit that makes men depressed and leads to erectile dysfunction. Porn is poison to young men and it has no societal good. This is to say nothing of rampant sexual abuse and drug addiction in the porn industry. The situation we have now, with less in-person sex, is actually much worse than it was fifteen years ago.

Ideally, hardcore pornography should be banned outright. Porn is not free speech. The men who wrote and signed the Constitution would laugh in your face if you told them the First Amendment protected the "right" to stream graphic sex videos featuring truly depraved content directly to people's homes or handheld devices.

But at the very least, porn websites should require age verification. Porn peddlers object to age verification because they are groomers who want special rights that apply only to them. Every other product that society has decided should not be available to children has age verification, from alcohol and tobacco to gambling and even analog porn.

Arguments about "privacy" do not apply to any of these other things, so there is no reason porn should not be subject to the same age verification as a pack of cigarettes. "Privacy" is not more important than protecting children, and it is time for Congress to revisit this issue and implement a nationwide age verification mandate. A patchwork of state laws is not good enough. This is the definition of interstate commerce, so Congress has legitimate Constitutional authority here. It is time to protect children from these groomers.