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Supreme Court Porn ID Ruling 'A Blow to Freedom of Speech and Privacy,' Says ACLU
"The legislature claims to be protecting children from sexually explicit materials, but the law will do little to block their access, and instead deters adults from viewing vast amounts of First Amendment-protected content," said Cecillia Wang, national legal director of the ACLU.
Jun 27, 2025
Free speech advocates are sounding the alarm after the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday upheld a Texas law requiring users to share personal identification to view adult material online.
The law, which mandates websites that host sexual content to require users to provide photo IDs or biometric scans to verify that they are over 18, was challenged by several adult websites and free speech organizations. They argued that it violated adult users' First Amendment rights.In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines siding with Texas, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority opinion that the law "only incidentally burdens the protected speech of adults," and therefore did not require "strict scrutiny" from the Court.
But advocates for free speech and online security have warned that such laws—which have passed in 24 states—have the potential to be much more invasive, both to personal expression and privacy.
Following the ruling, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) decried the Court's decision as "a blow to freedom of speech and privacy."
"The Supreme Court has departed from decades of settled precedents that ensured that sweeping laws purportedly for the benefit of minors do not limit adults' access to First Amendment-protected materials," said Cecillia Wang, national legal director of the ACLU. "The legislature claims to be protecting children from sexually explicit materials, but the law will do little to block their access, and instead deters adults from viewing vast amounts of First Amendment-protected content."
The ACLU's concerns echoed those expressed in Justice Elena Kagan's dissenting opinion, in which she said the court should have applied "strict scrutiny," which would have required the bill to use the least restrictive means possible to meet its goal. Applying strict scrutiny is standard in cases involving content related restrictions on expression, and has been used in past cases related to obscenity.
"No one doubts that the distribution of sexually explicit speech to children, of the sort involved here, can cause great harm," she added. "But the First Amendment protects those sexually explicit materials, for every adult. So a state cannot target that expression, as Texas has here, any more than is necessary to prevent it from reaching children."
During oral arguments in January, Kagan warned of the potential "spillover danger" if the court were to weaken strict scrutiny for free expression cases.
"You relax strict scrutiny in one place," she said, "and all of a sudden, strict scrutiny gets relaxed in other places."
Friday's ruling comes as red states have introduced laws increasingly cracking down on public discussion of sex and gender.
These have included laws banning sexual education or the discussion of LGBTQ+ identities in schools, bans on books containing "divisive" topics including sex and gender, and bans on drag shows in public spaces. Many states have also introduced laws allowing parents to challenge books containing "divisive" concepts, including discussions of sexuality and LGBTQ+ identity.
On Friday, the Supreme Court also ruled on religious liberty grounds in favor of parents' rights to opt their children out from classes with storybooks involving LGBTQ+ characters.
"As it has been throughout history, pornography is once again the canary in the coal mine of free expression," said Alison Boden, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, which was one of the plaintiffs in the Texas case.
Beyond burdening adults' free expression, critics warned that requiring photo identification poses a privacy risk to porn viewers.
The conservative justices defended the law as tantamount to others that require identification to access alcohol or to enter adults-only spaces. In his majority opinion, Thomas wrote that the law is "appropriately tailored because it permits users to verify their ages through the established methods of providing government-issued identification and sharing transactional data."
However, Kagan argued in her dissent that requiring photo ID for online activity is fundamentally different because the user has no idea if their identifying information is being tracked or logged.
"It is turning over information about yourself and your viewing habits—respecting speech many find repulsive—to a website operator, and then to… who knows?" she said.
Evan Greer, founder of the online privacy advocacy group Fight for the Future, wrote on BlueSky that the ruling bodes ill for internet privacy more generally.
"This is bad in a variety of ways that have nothing to do with porn and everything to do with expanding invasive surveillance of every single internet user, including all adults," Greer said.
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'People Will Die,' Warn Progressives as Supreme Court Lets States Defund Planned Parenthood
"This is a systematic decimation of access to reproductive healthcare and a signifier of what else is likely to come," warned one critic.
Jun 26, 2025
In its latest blow to reproductive healthcare in the United States, the Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority on Thursday blocked Planned Parenthood and one of its patients from suing South Carolina over its defunding of the medical provider because it performs abortions—a decision that critics say will cost lives as more Republican-controlled states follow suit.
At question in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic was whether Medicaid beneficiaries can sue in order to secure healthcare services under a law that allows patients to choose any qualified provider. The high court ruled 6-3 that they cannot, with liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting.
"The decision whether to let private plaintiffs enforce a new statutory right poses delicate questions of public policy. New rights for some mean new duties for others," Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority. "And private enforcement actions, meritorious or not, can force governments to direct money away from public services and spend it instead on litigation."
"The job of resolving how best to weigh those competing costs and benefits belongs to the people's elected representatives, not
unelected judges charged with applying the law as they find it," Gorsuch added.
Concurring with the majority, far-right Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the ruling invites further scrutiny of Section 1983, the federal law empowering individuals to sue state and local government officials for violating their constitutional rights.
And, predictably, in Medina, Justice Thomas isn't content to axe Planned Parenthood from Medicaid. He would go further ... "to reexamine more broadly this Court’s §1983 jurisprudence . . . ."This is an invitation to undermine a major foundation of civil rights litigation.
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— Melissa Murray (@profmmurray.bsky.social) June 26, 2025 at 7:17 AM
In a furious dissent, Jackson wrote that "the court's decision today is not the first to so weaken the landmark civil rights protections that Congress enacted during the Reconstruction era."
"That means we do have a sense of what comes next: As with those past rulings, today's decision is likely to result in tangible harm to real people," she continued. "At a minimum, it will deprive Medicaid recipients in South Carolina of their only meaningful way of enforcing a right that Congress has expressly granted to them."
"And, more concretely, it will strip those South Carolinians—and countless other Medicaid recipients around the country—of a deeply personal freedom: the 'ability to decide who treats us at our most vulnerable,'" Jackson added. "The court today disregards Congress' express desire to prevent that very outcome."
More than 70 million Americans rely upon Medicaid, the federal government's primary health insurance program for lower-income people. The program is facing the prospect of major cuts under a Republican budget proposal that critics warn could cause millions of people to lose their healthcare coverage in service to a massive tax break backed by President Donald Trump that would disproportionately benefit the rich and corporations.
According to Planned Parenthood Federation of America president and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson, "currently, 20% of South Carolinians—over 1 million—receive healthcare services through the Medicaid program, and approximately 5% of those recipients sought sexual and reproductive health care services at Planned Parenthood South Atlantic (PPSAT) so far this year."
Responding to Thursday's ruling, McGill Johnson said that "the consequences are not theoretical in South Carolina or other states with hostile legislatures."
"Patients need access to birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, and more. And right now, lawmakers in Congress are trying to 'defund' Planned Parenthood as part of their long-term goal to shut down Planned Parenthood and ban abortion nationwide," she added. "Make no mistake, the attacks are ongoing and Planned Parenthood will continue to do everything possible to show up in communities across the country and provide care."
Under tremendous Republican-led pressure, Planned Parenthood has closed or announced plans to close at least 20 locations across seven states since the beginning of the year.
"Today's decision is a grave injustice that strikes at the very bedrock of American freedom and promises to send South Carolina deeper into a healthcare crisis," PPSAT president and CEO Paige Johnson said following Thursday's decision. "Twice, justices of this court denied to even hear this case because [South Carolina Gov. Henry] McMaster's intent is clear: weaponize anti-abortion sentiment to deprive communities with low incomes of basic healthcare."
"Planned Parenthood South Atlantic will continue to operate and offer care in South Carolina, including for people enrolled in Medicaid," Johnson added. "To our patients, we will do everything in our power to ensure you can get the care you need at low or no cost to you. Know that we are still here for you, and we will never stop fighting for you to reclaim the rights and dignity you deserve."
Destiny Lopez, co-president and CEO of the Guttmacher Institute, called the ruling "a grave injustice."
Lopez continued:
At a time when healthcare is already costly and difficult to access, stripping patients of their right to high-quality, affordable healthcare at the provider of their choosing is a dangerous violation of bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom.
Specifically targeting Planned Parenthood has long been a strategy of the anti-abortion movement. Planned Parenthood health centers are an irreplaceable part of the U.S. healthcare system; Guttmacher data show that among the 4.7 million contraceptive patients served by publicly supported clinics in 2020, one in three received care from Planned Parenthood.
"In the face of attempts to 'defund' Planned Parenthood and attack Medicaid, Title X, and other pillars of reproductive healthcare, the court's actions cannot be considered in a vacuum," Lopez asserted. "This is a systematic decimation of access to reproductive healthcare and a signifier of what else is likely to come. Everyone deserves choice in their healthcare provider and access to the family planning they need."
Progressive groups and individuals also condemned Thursday's ruling, with the Freedom From Religion Foundation lamenting that "Christian nationalists win, women and low-income patients lose."
"This isn't justice," FFRF added. "It's religious favoritism at the highest level."
Planned Parenthood provides affordable:➡ Cancer screening➡ STD testing and treatment➡ Prenatal supportToday's decision from SCOTUS to allow SC to remove Planned Parenthood from Medicaid means that people will be sicker and people will die.www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
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— Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (@jayapal.house.gov) June 26, 2025 at 7:34 AM
Meagan Hatcher-Mays, senior adviser at United for Democracy, said in a statement that "millions of Medicaid patients across the country rely on Planned Parenthood health centers for their primary and reproductive care, and people who face systemic racism and discrimination—Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities, as well as LGBTQ+ people and women—are more likely to be covered by Medicaid."
"It's ironic that the MAGA justices issued this ruling today, almost three years to the day that they overturned Roe v. Wade and threw abortion access into chaos across the country," Hatcher-Mays added. "Today's ruling is a further attack on healthcare, bodily autonomy, and our freedoms. This ruling clearly harms communities in South Carolina, and it's a matter of time before we see that harm expand further into the country."
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The Mythical Rich Suburban Republican (White) Ladies Who The Democrats Chase But Can Never Find
Considering the origins of this destructive neoliberal mythology may help those who want to challenge it.
Jun 20, 2025
Clintonite Democrats are cooking yet another version of their long-running fantasy of the rich, suburbanite (white) ladies who are more committed to good government and rule of law than to their tax cuts and pissing on poor people as the anchor of the coalition that will defeat Trump and Trumpism.
This fantasy has been their go-to in nearly every presidential election since 1996. No doubt many readers recall what should have been its last stand—the 2016 election when both Senate leader Chuck Schumer and former Philadelphia mayor and Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell boasted that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”
Now it has taken the form of lauding reactionary Lynne Cheney as an icon of principle, to an extent that it should not surprise if her name is floated at least as the vice-presidential candidate on a 2028 Democratic ticket. But it also appeared in Rep. Ro Khanna’s reaction to Elon Musk’s apparent break with Trump. California's Khanna, a leader within the Democrats’ Congressional Progressive Caucus, urged reaching out to Musk possibly to win him back, despite the fact that he is, well... Elon Musk and that his break with the cosplay Il Duce was provoked by his outrage that Trump’s proposed budget wasn’t draconian enough.
[The mythology] does the ideological work these Democrats want without explicitly acknowledging their investor class allegiances.
Commitment to the fantasy showed up as well in the choice of conservative Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) to rebut Trump’s speech to Congress. Slotkin rose to the occasion by praising Ronald Reagan—the person most singly responsible for putting our national politics on the road to Trumpism—four different times. Now Democratic sages like James Carville and Hillary Clinton have floated the likes of Rahm Emanuel, whose approach to building a Democratic congressional majority as Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair centered on recruiting Republicans to run as Democrats, as the party’s and country’s savior in 2028.
Even more recently, flamboyant Dallas Mavericks owner and Ayn Rand fan Mark Cuban has popped up as a possible contender in a telling “it takes a billionaire” line of argument. And now it seems to have found itself a simulacrum of a social theory/manifesto to rally around in the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson 300-page beacon to the future, Abundance, which the publisher describes as a “once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty.”
Klein has been anointed by such paragons of middle-brow ponderousness as David Brooks and Fareed Zakaria, who moreover predicts that “People will recruit [him and Thompson] to run the Democratic Party.” (Must be the little glasses.) The argument, as one might suspect from those authors and endorsers, is warmed over neoliberal bromides and bullshit—just the sort of intervention that would appeal to Clintonite Democrats whose politics has always come down to trying to sell right-wing policies as the limits of a reasonable left.
The Democrats are going to do what they are going to do. One takeaway from Trumpism’s victory—and I know this is a point I’ve made over and over for quite some time—should be that there is no organized left in the United States capable of having any impact on shaping national political debate and, therefore, the primary commitment of leftists as such should be doing the deep organizing work necessary to begin generating such an embedded left. So whether and how the Clintonites can be challenged in the struggle to define the terms of opposition to Trumpism is a matter for liberals to work out within the Democratic Party itself. It may be helpful for that struggle, though, to consider the origins of the fantasy that has for three decades justified dragging the party’s efforts to appeal to a popular constituency away from working-class concerns. (For example, in 2004, John Kerry’s feckless campaign called them “national security moms.”) We know that objective is why the fantasy persists among Democratic neoliberals; it does the ideological work they want without explicitly acknowledging their investor class allegiances and enables them to hide behind catering to a bourgeois feminism. Considering its origins, however, may help those who want to challenge it.
The mythical rich suburban (white) moderate Republican woman has a very specific source. It emerged out of the concatenation of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing in the fall of 1991 and the1992 national election. Its root is in the election for the U.S. Senate in Illinois that year. The Democratic incumbent, Alan Dixon, was also on the Senate Judiciary Committee that presided over the Thomas hearing. Dixon promised the George H. W. Bush administration his vote for Thomas in exchange for the administration’s guarantee that it would run only a weak Republican challenger against him. The Republicans kept their end of the bargain. Dixon’s GOP challenger was a relative non-entity, Rich Williamson, who had been an official in the Reagan administration and was from Kenilworth, an especially wealthy enclave within the wealthy Northshore suburbs of Chicago.
But the Democratic primary turned out to be a wild card. In addition to Carol Mosely Braun’s candidacy, Dixon was challenged as well by Al Hofeld, a maverick, self-financing multimillionaire who targeted Dixon and garnered 27% of the vote in the primary. Dixon and Mosely Braun split the remaining vote, and Mosely Braun won the primary with 38% of the total vote. In both the primary and the general election, she benefited from bourgeois feminist backlash against Thomas and Dixon, and she ran well among suburban Republican women against the relative non-entity, Williamson. That was a fluke, the product of very particular circumstances in a very particular moment. It has not been repeated, not even in Mosely Braun’s re-election bid in 1998, which she lost to Republican Peter Fitzgerald.
It has never materialized as an electoral reality. So that’s that.
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