My beard is gray but the government requires me to show a valid state ID when buying booze, cigs and porno mags at the gas station. If that's not a violation of the Constitution, why should carding people on porno websites be different?
I never said there was a constitutional issue (I don't think that there is).
The difference between showing ID to a clerk and this sort of thing is recordkeeping. A clerk is only checking the DOB on the ID, not keeping a record of your identity[1]. Online age checks keep records.
If there were some way of doing an age check without having your identity attached to it or having to expose yourself to some commercial third party, I wouldn't have an issue. That's a tough nut, though.
[1] I'm aware that certain businesses do keep a scan of your ID, but they're the exception and not the rule.
As a foreigner, it's kind of strange that violent movies (and political propaganda disguised as violent movies) are protected speech and pornography is not.
In Europe, parents fear that violent media might effect their children, but worry less about sexual media.
In America, parents worry that sexual media might effect their children, but worry less about violent media.
I'm of the opinion that both are half right and both are half wrong. Both violent and sexual media effect the people who consume it. We are what we eat. There is no kind of media that doesn't effect consumers of that media in some way. Also, it bears mentioning that a lot of pornography is both sexual and violent...
(In case it isn't clear, those two trends I list above are gross generalizations. When I was a child in America, my mother would not allow me to play with tin soldiers or GI Joes, nerf guns, or watch cartoons more violent than Arthur. Not a typical American childhood, but nevertheless still an American childhood. Generalizations always have exceptions but I think they can be useful nevertheless.)
I think it's silly to frame them as a tradeoff, and as protection being something special, when everything is protected by default with limited exceptions.
If you want to argue that pornography should not be an exception, or that violence should be, then fair enough, but given they're such different types of content it's nonsensical to try and put them on an axis and claim one is further along it than the other.
