This is not a defense of pornography. It’s a First Amendment question.

 

A serious question for adults. Not culture-war tourists. Not bible-clutchers, or morality police looking for a pulpit.

This is not a defense of pornography.

It’s a First Amendment question.

Florida has effectively blocked access to multiple mainstream, legal adult-content websites, large, established platforms that have operated openly for years. This is not about children. Not animals. Not illegal material. These are lawful, age-restricted sites accessed by consenting adults.

The state’s justification is age verification.

On paper, that sounds reasonable. Protect minors. Fine. No sane person argues against that.

But here’s where the blade turns.

If the real concern is child protection, why is enforcement aimed almost exclusively at adult sexual content, while other online material with well-documented harm to minors sails right through untouched? Graphic violence. Exploitation narratives. Algorithm-fed rabbit holes that shove disturbing material at kids until it sticks. Those remain largely unbothered.

That kind of selectivity isn’t neutral. It’s a tell.

The First Amendment isn’t there for nice speech. It’s there for the speech that irritates, embarrasses, offends, and makes people wish someone else would shut it up for them. The moment protection depends on good taste, the right is already dead. Obscenity isn’t protected. Fine. But legal pornography involving consenting adults is. The government may regulate access for minors. What it is not supposed to do is quietly choke off lawful adult speech through “regulations” so onerous they function as bans.

So this isn’t a moral argument.

It’s a constitutional one.

At what point does a state requirement stop being regulation and start acting like suppression? When adults lose access to legal content not because it’s unlawful, but because the state dislikes the category, are we still inside First Amendment guardrails, or have we wandered off into something more selective and ideological?

This is not about liking porn.

It’s about whether the government gets to decide which lawful speech adults may access by making compliance selectively impossible. If the answer is yes, the precedent doesn’t stop here. It never does. Power never packs up neatly once it’s unpacked.

I’m not asking for jokes.

I’m not asking for a morality check. I am looking for thoughts on the legitimacy of morally based protection policies.

So I’m asking a simple, adult question: does Florida’s approach actually withstand constitutional scrutiny, or does it cross the line from protecting children into viewpoint-driven restriction of lawful adult expression?

That’s it.

That’s the question.

Before the usual objections show up, let’s slow this down. Yes, the state has an interest in protecting minors. No one serious disputes that. Yes, companies technically have a choice whether to comply. That’s not the end of the analysis, it’s the beginning. When “compliance” is engineered in a way that predictably collapses adult access to lawful speech, the outcome matters more than the press-release intent. Constitutional review doesn’t stop at what lawmakers say they’re doing. It looks at what actually happens. If the state can wipe out access to protected expression by stacking requirements no major platform can realistically meet, while leaving other harmful content alone, that isn’t neutral regulation. That’s pressure. That’s selective. Call it whatever you want, but it functions as suppression, and pretending otherwise is how rights don’t get repealed, they just quietly stop working.

I welcome your thoughts.

Brian Wilson: I am an IT Generalist with 30+ years in the trenches of infrastructure and cybersecurity. A patriot who takes both national security and civil liberties seriously, I believe strong systems are built on personal accountability, restraint, and an honest understanding of risk, not slogans or blind party allegiance.

By Brian Wilson: The Bipartisan Patriot