Opinion

Porn isn’t free speech — on the web or anywhere

Of all the stats that keep parents up at night, the one that haunts me most often is this: My toddler son is likely to encounter Internet porn before puberty.

So I cheered when I read a Friday letter from four members of Congress urging Attorney General Bill Barr to revive America’s obscenity laws to “stop the explosion of obscene pornography.” Amen.

Then came the dismaying reaction — not just from the usual suspects on the left, but from many on the right, where access to porn has bizarrely emerged as a touchstone of “conservative” orthodoxy.

Online porn isn’t that bad, the Twitter libertarians insist. Plus, there is no way to restrict access to online porn, and even if there were, such regulation would sound the death knell for our ancient liberties.

All nonsense.

Online porn is that bad. For starters, there is the clear exploitation and links to human trafficking, which belie the libertarians’ glib slogans about “consenting adults.”

Given the billions of videos and images, there is simply no way to rule out that the average porn consumer doesn’t watch images of women who are trafficked, coerced or otherwise exploited.

Working with numerous victims, Karen Countryman-Roswurm of Wichita State University’s Center for Combating Human Trafficking was shocked to learn how many of them had been involved in porn shoots, used by traffickers to “desensitize them to the sexual acts they would experience” and as “advertising” for abuse.

Then there are the harms to consumers, especially boys and young men. Porn creates “a powerful biochemical ‘rush’ in the user,” writes psychologist John Mark Haney for the American Counseling Association. “Teens who experience this biochemical thrill will, not surprisingly, want to experience it again.”

Other well-established effects on young users, per Haney: “modeling and imitation of inappropriate behaviors; unhealthy interference with normal sexual development; emotional side effects including nightmares and residual feelings of shame, guilt, anxiety and confusion”; and violent attitudes about sex and women. Fifteen states have declared it a public-health crisis.

OK, online porn is bad, critics of prohibition may admit — but why can’t parents do their job and police it? This is the most infuriating of their responses.

Of course, I’ll do my damnedest to keep my son away from smut, but there are numerous situations where I can’t control his Internet activities. And what about parents who are neglectful: Does the state not have some duty to protect all children from a supremely addictive product that can twist their sexuality?

Happily, there are perfectly constitutional ways to at least limit access. Reno v. ACLU, the 1997 Supreme Court decision that deregulated Internet smut, was decided on narrow, outdated grounds. Justice John Paul Stevens held that Internet porn doesn’t fall under existing law allowing government regulation, because “the Internet is not as ‘invasive’ as radio and television.”

LOL, as the kids say.

Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project notes that the ­Supremes “did not strike down all obscenity laws in Reno v. ACLU.” Nor did they “overturn existing precedent recognizing the government’s interest in defending minors from both obscene and non-obscene ‘indecent’ material.”

Which means it’s still possible to restrict access. Schilling suggests requiring Internet service providers to create opt-in systems, whereby the default version of the Web is porn-free, with adults permitted to request the unfiltered version. Another possibility: corralling all porn into an adult “zone” that requires age verification to enter, while banning it ­everywhere else.

Would any of this flout constitutional “originalism”? “Real originalists,” as Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule quipped recently, “uphold obscenity convictions ­under the common-law rule,” the broad definition that prevailed for most of the nation’s history: Obscenity is any material with a tendency to “deprave and corrupt the morals of those whose minds are open to such influence.”

PornHub would most definitely count. Indeed, the Founding generation would likely have reacted to it not with high-libertarian nostrums, but with tar and feathers.

Sohrab Ahmari is The Post’s op-ed editor. Twitter: @SohrabAhmari