SOMEWHERE IN THE DESERT, Ariz. – While I have no children of my own (at least that I am willing to acknowledge or provide financial support to/for), I am, like every thinking and caring American, concerned about the health, welfare, safety and sanity of the world’s children.
Chiefly, I want children everywhere to be doing well enough in life that they don’t feel it necessary to break into my house and steal my shit. But I also think it would be nice if they have enough to eat, avoid getting strung out on fentanyl and – most importantly – don’t become irredeemable perverts through exposure to online pornography and other mind-warping materials.
Thankfully, the Supreme Court has my back. They’re here to make sure people under 18 years old are learning important things in life, like how to use a VPN, or how to find the names of adult websites hosted in the Netherlands that honestly don’t give a flying fuck about porn-restrictive state laws in some country across the Atlantic established by Puritans a few centuries back.
Still, I’m concerned that merely requiring internet users to confirm their age before accessing filthy, mind-degrading smut is insufficient to protect minors from harmful material, both online and in other contexts.
Let’s be clear here: Porn isn’t the only harmful thing kids can run across in life. There’s also manipulative marketing, political propaganda, snuff films, “beauty influencers,” Ohio State wrestling coaches, Penn State football coaches, Catholic priests, everything ever published by Disney, the socialism-indoctrinating nightmare Sesame Street and an increasingly ubiquitous sociopath who goes by the moniker – and I swear I am not making this up – “Mr. Beast.”
Clearly, everywhere we look, there’s harm to minors. Thankfully, now that the Supreme Court has made clear that It’s no problem to restrict adult’s access to content that is protected by the First Amendment, so long as the restriction has “only an incidental effect on protected speech,” we also have a solution sitting right there in our hands, which are no longer occupied by our penises, because we can’t access online porn without handing over our IDs to some anonymous third-party via the internet, which is a move for suckers and rubes.
Would it truly impact the speech rights of adults in any meaningful way if we also require age verification to watch Veggie Tales, for example?
Consider for a moment just how damaging it is for children to believe vegetables are capable of proselytizing to them – or worse yet, that those vegetables are modern prophets of some kind. It’s practically impossible to get a kid to eat broccoli as things stand; if a child begins to think of it as “John the Broccoli,” he’s never eating so much as another floret again!
Plus, just look at some of the vegetables themselves; you’re going to tell me Larry the Cucumber isn’t a stand-in for a penis or sex toy? Just look at that phallic shape! And while I haven’t watched it, because I don’t want MY mind to get warped by these creeps, I’d bet my bottom dollar the “Dance of the Cucumber” is a strip tease.
And don’t get me started on Clifford the Big Red Dog. I’m certain that if we scratch beneath the surface of that franchise, we’d find out Norman Bridwell was a commie propagandist, or that someone involved in the franchise he created is, at least. Why else would the big dog be red? Unless he’s a Republican…? Hmm. OK – maybe Clifford gets a pass, but it should still be an age-verified pass. And if the people who run the franchise want to make it clear their product isn’t communist propaganda, they can change it to “Clifford the Big Red Elephant.”
As you can probably tell, I’m all fired up right now. The more I think about it, the more I think the Supreme Court’s ruling actually came up a little short. Sure, a method for preventing minors from accessing online smut that’s somehow both intrusive and ineffective is a good start, but realistically, shouldn’t we close every library on earth, set fire to all non-math books and shut down the internet, just in case?
We’d be doing it for the children, after all.
