Kansas Is About to Pass the Most Extreme Age Verification Law Yet

News@lemmy.world – 378 points – 3 months ago

Kansas Is About to Pass the Most Extreme Age Verification Law Yet

An age verification bill in Kansas that is the most extreme in the country has passed both House and Senate and is on its way to the governor’s desk. The bill will make sites with more than 25 percent adult content liable to heavy fines if they don’t verify that visitors are over the age of 18. It also calls being gay “sexual conduct,” which critics say could set up the state for more censorship of LGBT+ citizens.

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TL;DR: IANAL, however, the document this bill references to define what content is harmful to children directly, verbatim defines sexual conduct as including "homosexuality" broadly

Okay so this bill is SB394 (linked above obviously) and it opens with the following

Any commercial entity that knowingly shares or distributes material that is harmful to minors on a website and such material appears on 25% or more of the webpages viewed on such website in any calendar month, or that knowingly hosts such website (...)

It carries on to later define "harmful to minors" in section h-3 as the following:

(3) "Harmful to minors" means the same as defined in K.S.A. 21-6402, and amendments thereto.

If we go look at K.S.A. 21-6402 we can find that it is regarding "Promotion to minors of material harmful to minors" and goes on to declare in section d-2 that "harmful to minors" refers to several things including sexual conduct (I'm omitting this full quote for brevity, you can find it in the linked document).

Now if we look a little further down, we can see that Kansas currently defines sexual content as defined in section d-8:

(8) "sexual conduct" means acts of masturbation, homosexuality, sexual intercourse or physical contact with a person's clothed or unclothed genitals or pubic area or buttocks or with a human female's breast; and (...)

Considering all this, i think extremely reasonable to believe that this could outlaw LGBTQ+ content from being displayed openly online within Kansas

Edit: fixed sexual conduct/content mixups

I'm going to assume your repeating typos of "content" and "conduct" are accidental and you meant the same word for all times you used one of them...

Holy shit why the fuck is homosexuality in section d-8. It's an easy fix to just delete that one word.

Thanks for sharing and with such detail, honestly you've really outlined the issue and helped me see. The sexual conduct definition is horrendous

Why would they do that? The whole bill was made specifically to include that word.

"The cruelty is the point"

Have you lot considered storming the capitol building and taking over....

Oh yeh, right

Whoops, Yes it was a little past 1am when I wrote that I must've gotten them mixed up which switching back and forth between the documents. I'll double check and correct that in a moment.

I'm sincerely glad you actually read it all, the world can be a little fucked right now.