‘We love our vices in Louisiana,” says state representative Laurie Schlegel with an unmistakable New Orleans accent. A proud native of Jefferson Parish, Schlegel — like many locals — is both a devout Christian and plenty familiar with the bars, casinos, and jazz clubs that have made her hometown . . . well, unique.

This made it especially surprising when last year’s passage of what Schlegel considered to be a commonsense bill requiring age-verification to access hard-core porn on the internet thrust her into the national spotlight and brought on accusations that she was orchestrating a prudish, puritanical, anti-sex crusade.

While Schlegel’s bill does deserve credit for inspiring similar legislation all around the country, its motivation is not ideological, and its proliferation is not by design. Pornography today is annexing more and more of childhood. The average age at which children first encounter pornography is now between eleven and twelve, according to Emily Rothman’s 2021 study. Those who accept this status quo may find it convenient to attack Schlegel as a partisan operator, but the truth is that she’s more mom than mastermind.

Just over two years ago, Schlegel had hardly considered entering politics, much less what her policy agenda might be. Her son was in high school; her husband, a judge, was helping Louisiana state courts implement technology in response to Covid-19; and Schlegel was busy at Lighthouse Counseling, where she primarily serves people suffering from sex addiction, a condition that the Cleveland Clinic defines as “an intense focus on sexual fantasies, urges or activities that can’t be controlled and causes distress or harm.”

“I was 100 percent not looking to do anything like this,” Schlegel explains. In fact, it wasn’t until the previous occupant of her seat abruptly resigned in January 2021 that Schlegel even began to consider the possibility of holding public office. “I had to make a very quick decision,” she says. But ultimately it was simple: “I am a counselor. . . . I care about people.” She felt she could make a difference in the statehouse.

She certainly has. Guided by her “passion as a mother . . . to help raise up a healthy functioning next generation,” Schlegel has introduced bills that provide books and reading materials to underserved students (H.B. 852, 2022); create education savings accounts (universal vouchers) to give parents more choice in their students’ schooling (H.B. 824, 2022); require the implementation of suicide-prevention and student-safety training in public schools (H.B. 495, 2022); and increase the individual-income-tax deduction for elementary- and secondary-school tuition (H.B. 32, 2023).

Despite Schlegel’s experience as a certified sex-addiction therapist and her resulting familiarity with the devastating consequences of porn on “children and young adults who started watching it at a very early age,” she says that she didn’t come up with the idea for her age-verification bill (H.B. 142, 2022) until she read a story about pop singer Billie Eilish. “She said she had been watching pornography since she was eleven years old, and it had destroyed her brain,” Schlegel explains. “I thought, how courageous. . . . I need to do something about it.”

Rather than starting from scratch, however, Schlegel began by looking at her state’s constitutional tradition as well its laws around online sports betting and alcohol delivery, both of which are legal in Louisiana (remember those vices!) but require electronic age verification. With such laws already on the books — not to mention LA Wallet, a first-of-its-kind third-party app that allows Louisianans to upload their driver’s-license information in exchange for a digital profile that serves as the legal equivalent of a physical ID — Schlegel determined that “the technology to be able to protect adult privacy and be able to protect children in digital spaces” was available. But for some reason the state had been “sort of giving a pass to online pornography.”

To her, that was unacceptable. So, when Schlegel sat down to craft H.B. 142, she worked closely with First Amendment experts to come up with language that would not only keep kids safe but also pass constitutional muster. The bill reads in part:

Any commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material shall be held liable if the entity fails to perform reasonable age verification methods.

In other words, porn websites — essentially the strip clubs and brothels of the digital world — are now required to have a bouncer stand at the door and check ID, just like their physical-world counterparts. In practice, this simply means that people in Louisiana who are attempting to access websites where pornography makes up more than one-third of the content are met with a screen that asks them to verify their age through LA Wallet and reassures them that their privacy is protected.

As Calvin Fabre, president of Envoc (LA Wallet’s parent company), told the Louisiana Illuminator, “third-party age verification vendors don’t even get an individual’s date of birth when a user logs into LA Wallet, only a bit of data that says whether the user is under or over 18.”

It sounds simple enough, but not everyone was on board. And Schlegel knew that she would face significant opposition from important segments of both parties: Some progressive Democrats see porn as part of the sexual revolution and defend it as a form of liberation, and some libertarian Republicans see porn as an issue of free speech and express concerns about digital privacy and the government regulating private enterprises. Not to mention the powerful porn lobby, which has been downplaying the negative effects of its products for decades while becoming a multibillion-dollar industry.

To persuade the bill’s would-be detractors, Schlegel first made sure to include a provision that made it possible for individuals to sue LA Wallet or any other company for damages resulting from its “retaining the identifying information” of a user. This failed to sway the Free Speech Coalition, “a non-partisan non-profit trade association for the adult industry,” whose director of public affairs told National Review that bills like Schlegel’s are “a disaster for digital privacy.” But it was sufficient to convince every voting Republican in Louisiana’s house and senate to support the bill (four Republican representatives and one senator were absent).

From her work as a therapist, Schlegel also knew that she “needed to educate the members on this issue.” “People aren’t aware of what kids can access,” she explains. “They don’t know that research has shown that 90 percent of the most viewed pornography scenes are aggressive toward women.” Her solution: a webinar open to members of the legislature with Gail Dines, professor emerita of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College and the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. Dines is also the founder and president of Culture Reframed, a nonprofit that offers programming to parents and professionals about the issue of pornography and seeks to build “resilience and resistance in young people to hypersexualized media and pornography.”

A self-described feminist, Dines helped Schlegel reach across the aisle and persuade some of her progressive colleagues. More important, she helped Schlegel explain to all the members — many of whom are old enough to still think of porn primarily in terms of Playboy magazines — how the industry has evolved over time to have devastating consequences on the young.

Citing research that she also presented to legislators, Dines tells me that porn makes boys “more depressed,” “more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction,” and “less likely to get married.” “And when you traumatize a generation of boys,” she adds, “you put at risk an entire generation of girls” because “the trauma is played out on their bodies.” The result, she explains, is the “normalization of sex as a transactional, violent act.”

To give color to her statistics, Dines also shared gut-wrenching stories with legislators from her research in the field. They are not hard to come by. Heidi Olson, a pediatric sexual-assault nurse examiner in Kansas City, has similarly disturbing stories. “I always assumed that whoever would be acting out on a child would be a creepy old man in a basement,” Olson tells me. “No one prepared me for the huge number of violent sexual acts in which children and teenagers are often the perpetrators themselves.”

According to studies, at least 33 percent of sexual assaults against children are perpetrated by other children or teens, and though Olson did not initially conclude porn was to blame for these horrible incidents, the evidence kept mounting: “One time,” she explains, “we were taking care of a 13-year-old girl who had been raped by her 16-year-old brother and she spontaneously disclosed that he said, ‘I was looking at pornography and I can’t stop thinking about it’ just before he raped her.” In another situation, Olson says, a twelve-year-old girl who had been assaulted by a 16-year-old after meeting online insisted that there wasn’t “anything wrong” with the encounter. Later, Olson and her team learned that “her parents gave her an iPad when she was five and she had been watching porn for seven years.” The experience had completely desensitized the child, even to her own abuse.

These stats and stories only begin to capture the real-world consequences of what Dines calls our “porn-saturated culture.” But even this was enough to help Schlegel persuade all the Republicans and all but one of Louisiana’s Democrats — including Governor John Bel Edwards — to support the law, which came into effect on January 1, 2023.

Since then, Schlegel’s novel legislation has received plenty of press: some positive but most negative. Those aforementioned critics who raise concerns about privacy and free speech also argue that the law won’t stop teenagers from finding online porn and suggest that it is an issue for parents, not the government, to solve. While each of these claims is worth refuting in detail — for example, porn companies (among the corporate world’s most prolific data-miners) cannot be considered guardians of privacy — they have not proven compelling to state legislators across the country.

At the time of this writing, copycat bills have already passed both chambers in Mississippi, Virginia, Utah, and Arkansas; passed one chamber in Arizona; and been introduced in a handful of other states. Most have bipartisan support.

All of this raises an important question: Why have these age-verification bills become so popular all of a sudden, especially among conservatives? After all, hardcore porn has been becoming more accessible for decades.

Any answer must begin with technology. Although the internet brought about today’s deep integration of porn into our society and culture, its continued development has also made bills like Schlegel’s both politically pressing and technologically possible. In fact, the same advances in digital technology that have made porn so widespread have begun to produce a backlash from parents and have simultaneously given legislators the tools to do something about it.

But we have been in similar situations before. Going all the way back to child-labor laws in the aftermath of the industrial revolution, conservatives have often balked when the opportunity to protect children against predatory industries has presented itself. The porn issue is just one example of how conservatives have ceded ground by failing to regulate obvious social problems in the wake of technological upheaval.

This time something is different: Regular moms and dads are leading the charge. One such parent is Tyler Dees, a newly elected state senator from Siloam Springs, Ark., who introduced the age-verification bill in his state (S.B. 66). He’s troubled about the way “porn is eroding our culture” and sees this legislation “as a partnership with parents” that aims to “help arm them against the dangers of progressive technology.” Dees’s views are in synch with those of an increasingly influential coalition in American politics, one that could play a central role in determining the outcome of the 2024 Republican primaries and the general election.

This group, sometimes called the parents’-rights movement, tends to view education policy more broadly and intervene in it more aggressively than conservatives have done historically. To be sure, this new coalition almost entirely supports long-standing conservative education priorities such as school choice (as Schlegel’s own legislative record indicates). But it also thinks the education of a child requires giving parents more control not only over where their kids can go to school but also over what they will learn in the classroom and how they will be formed by our increasingly digital world, from social media and artificial intelligence to virtual reality and porn.

Schlegel’s bill has been uniquely successful because it has tapped into the force of this new coalition. Arguments against porn have featured traditionalist criticisms on moral and religious grounds, radical-feminist condemnations of it as a consequence of capitalism run amok, and even contemporary “New Right” claims that porn is a “public-health crisis.” Each of these perspectives captures a truth about the pornography problem but has struggled to garner enough popular support to be politically effective on its own. The arguments animating the latest wave of age-verification legislation, however, introduce a new, more politically effective criticism of pornography as an insufficient and utterly depraved form of sexual education for American children.

With the case for restricting access to porn thus articulated, it now seems at least possible that the porn war will no longer be lost as a single issue, but won as part of a broader social agenda that empowers parents and privileges the integrity of the family. When all is said and done, Schlegel is right. Americans (and especially Louisianians) certainly do enjoy their vices, but as it turns out, they may love their kids even more.