Bipartisan Caucus of Prudes Push Age Verification For Sexual Content In WA Legislature

If it sounds like a bill you’d read about in a red state, that’s because it is. A bipartisan coalition in the Washington State legislature is borrowing from policy “role models” such as Texas, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana to require residents to surrender their personal identifying information in order to access websites that host sexual material “harmful” to children.

As with most obscenity laws, the prudes pushing the age verification bill support it as a means to protect kids from the horrors of pornographic material, including (and please don’t read this unless you are 18) images of a woman’s nipple. But at a public hearing on Friday, both civil liberties advocates and LGBTQ+ organizations dominated the conversation, arguing against age verification because of glaring concerns about privacy and government censorship. 

House Bill 2112 — informally and very Republicanly called the Keep Our Children Safe Act — would require websites where more than a third of its content qualifies as “sexual material harmful to minors” to verify users' ages via digital verification, government-issued ID or another “commercially reasonable method.” Commercial entities that violate this law could face fines of up to $10,000 a day and if a minor sees the harmful material because the entity didn’t check ID, then they could owe another $250,000 on top of that. 

Let’s get this out of the way: These age verification laws do not achieve their stated purpose. Instead of protecting kids from porn, research shows that these laws merely shove both minor and adult users to darker corners of the internet where sites operate outside of the law. Not only that, kids and adults have circumvented state-specific laws by using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) that block their location or make them appear to be online in a state without verification laws. It’s all very “strict parents make sneaky kids.”

The actual beneficiary of the law won’t be children, but data brokers. Sure, the law says these websites can’t store or sell identifying information, but advocates warned lawmakers that no matter what they put in that bill, collecting data at all puts it at risk of breach. 

And even if lawmakers cracked the code for how to keep Washingtonians’ data safe, the bill offers an overly broad definition of “sexual material harmful to minors.” Advocates worried that history would repeat itself and this subjective language would include web materials for LGBTQ+ community building and education. 

Still, even if Washington did a good job not picking on queer websites, the law could have a chilling effect in which companies are overly diligent to avoid having to verify the ages of its users, purging anything that could be deemed as “sexual material harmful to minors.” Advocates have argued before the Supreme Court that this very phenomenon limits free speech. 

All of this sounds like the exact kind of moral panic Republicans sharpen their pitchforks for and have passed in more than 20 states. But what is actually disappointing is how many Democrats co-sponsored the bill, legitimizing the right-wing craze in Washington at a time where LGBTQ+ rights, privacy, and free speech are already under coordinated attack nationwide.

With re-election on the line later this year, Democrats, particularly those in strong blue districts, should really consider how their support of a Project 2025-style policy will read to voters. Democrats supporting this bill included prime sponsor Reps. Mari Leavitt (D-University Place), Cindy Ryu (D-Shoreline), Lisa Callan (D-Issaquah), Adison Richards (D-Bremerton), Janice Zahn (D-Bellevue), Dave Paul (D-Oak Harbor), Alicia Rule (D-Blaine), Chipalo Street (D-Seattle), Davina Duerr (D-Bothell), Mia Gregerson (D-SeaTac), Kristine Reeves (D-Federal Way), Rep. Mary Fosse (D-Everett), and Joe Timmons (D-Bellingham). 

Some of these Dems at least can excuse their support by pointing to the Republicans constituents they represent in their more moderate district. Paul, Timmons, and Richards fall into this catagory. But many of these Democrats represent firmly blue districts and have no need to pander to pearl clutchers — Street, Gregerson, Zahn to name a few. The choice is especially puzzling for Ryu, who is challenging Sen. Jesse Salomon, allegedly from the left. 

Luckily for these lawmakers, there’s still time to heed the concerns from public testimony, scrap the bill, and focus their limited time in Olympia on more productive policy.