Supreme Court upholds Texas porn law that caused Pornhub to leave the state

The Supreme Court today upheld a Texas law that requires age verification on porn sites, finding that the state's age-gating law doesn't violate the First Amendment.

The 6–3 decision delivered by Justice Clarence Thomas rejected an appeal by the Free Speech Coalition, an adult-industry lobby group. Pornhub disabled its website in Texas last year because of the state law.

The Supreme Court's conservative majority decided that the law should be reviewed under the standard of intermediate scrutiny "because it only incidentally burdens the protected speech of adults." The law "survives intermediate scrutiny because it 'advances important governmental interests unrelated to the suppression of free speech and does not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further those interests,'" the court said.

The majority said the law's burden on adults is incidental because adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification. "The First Amendment ...