Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

This article is incorrect.

The Supreme Court’s ruling only applied to obscene sexual material. It doesn’t apply to sex scenes within artistic works or sexual content in general.

There’s a test used to determine whether sexual material is considered pornographic. It’s known as the “I know it when I see it” test.

More info on this test here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

More specifically here is what is considered obscene:

The criteria were:

1. whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;

2. whether the work depicts or describes, in an offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions, as specifically defined by applicable state law;

3. whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The third criterion pertains to judgment made by "reasonable persons" of the United States as a whole, while the first pertains to that of members of the local community. Due to the larger scope of the third test, it is a more ambiguous criterion than the first two.

The article sounds very correct.

Anything can be perceived as “obscene” especially when you leave that interpretation open to any particular group.

kissing is obscene :)

The article would seem correct since "obscene" could be twisted to mean whatever they want. As the people making the ruling can say the average person believes x.

Who defines an artistic work? If I produce a porn film, why isn't that my artistic commentary on sex? Laws cant be this subjective because subjectivity implies subjectivity in ruling which is objectively awful.

Sounds like the article isn’t incorrect? The first two criteria depend on which community is doing the judging. New Yorkers will have à different norm than people from say a quaint 5k-person town where there’s an 8:1 church:supermarket ratio. The third criteria is vague, but vagueness cuts both ways.

In many cultures, it is. Especially kissing in the public.

In the legal sense, a judge would.

That’s an issue

The article is, in fact, correct.

Community standards vary by community, both physically and digitally. The community standards of a rural town in Utah or ChristianDating.net are likely to be wildly different than the community standards of a major city on the coastlines or PornHub users. This wrinkle is exactly why there's renewed efforts to define what obscenity legally is [1], so that it's inclusive of as much "porn" as possible.

Additionally, you're conveniently ignoring what the author spends most of their piece decrying: the fact that these laws permit "ambulance chasing" attorneys to sue across state lines. That's the real issue, especially given the fact that some state laws can allow civil action to lead to prison time for conviction. Even ignoring the potential outcomes however, these lawsuits are instantly bankrupting for a majority of Americans, and the laws so (intentionally) broadly written that even genuinely innocent parties are likely to fork over money to make it go away given the cost of mounting a defense.

Put simply: obscenity lacks a firm legal definition, the definition of porn is nebulous and variable from person to person, and these laws are written to maximize harm to a maximal population size. The intent is to criminalize as many undesirables as possible, and the current administration and political parties have been transparent that anyone not rich, white, straight, Christian, and cisgendered male are emphatically undesirable.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/167...

As an ambulance chaser, I can assure you that suing out of state defendants for out of state activity has become nearly impossible. See Daimler AG v. Bauman (2014), BNSF Railway Co. v. Tyrrell (2017), Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court (2017), Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District (2021), Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Co. (2023)

The jury

Yes, I know

A man in drag is considered obscene by some people.

Ah nvm, you sounded supportive.

Nope. A key aspect of this ruling is that it's about "sexual content that is obscene to minors but not to adults". "Adults have the right to access speech obscene only to minors [..] and submitting to age verification burdens the exercise of that right. But adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification."

The Texas law at issue takes the same three factors you quoted and lists them verbatim, but tacks on "for minors" to each factor, e.g.:

> (C) taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.

There's no precedent yet on what it means for something to "lack [..] artistic [..] value for minors", but it's almost certain to be interpreted as a harder standard to satisfy than the normal one.