Elizabeth Henson just moved to Louisiana in June with her husband, an active-duty Coast Guardsman. Like many couples, they watch pornography on major websites like Pornhub to keep the marriage spicy, sometimes together over the phone when her husband's duties take him away from home.
"We'll watch a video together on the phone, get some of that steam blown off and maintain that sense of intimacy," Henson, who served a decade in the Coast Guard herself, told Military.com. "This is one of the ways that we can keep that intimacy alive in our marriage."
In Louisiana, a state law passed in January requires users to verify their age on pornography sites using a driver's license or other ID through a third-party government website to verify that the user is at least 18 years old.
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Henson does not have a Louisiana state ID. Like many military spouses who move around frequently, she kept her driver's license from the last state she lived in.
Instead, she chose to go through the hurdle of paying for and installing a virtual private network, or VPN -- a tool that effectively tricks websites into thinking the user is in a different location -- to maintain access to websites she describes as helpful to her marriage. She either had to pay for the workaround or pay for a new ID -- both of which she argues are effectively a tax on her and her husband's sex life.
While Henson found a way around the law, she felt compelled to try to change it. She is a plaintiff in a lawsuit working its way through the court system. The suit, filed in June by the Free Speech Coalition, an advocacy group for the adult industry, argues that Louisiana's age verification law violates the First Amendment.
Henson and the other plaintiffs have asked for a preliminary injunction blocking the state's ID law while the case proceeds, and the state was ordered by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana to file its objections to the hold by July 17. The state was also tasked with filing paperwork supporting its effort to dismiss the case by July 10, though no document had appeared in the court's electronic system by publication time.
As news of the case surfaced after its filing, Henson's name began to appear in reports across the country as one of two individuals suing Louisiana. As a military spouse, the ID requirements are particularly problematic, she said.
"I'm not supposed to have to change my residency, or my driver's license, or my car registration every two to four years. That would be a huge financial burden," she said. "Porn is just a key component of being human and being an adult."
Military couples often experience extended separations as part of duty, and studies have shown as many as one-third of couples in long-distance relationships may rely on shared viewing of pornography as part of maintaining their relationships.
Louisiana is a major hub for the Coast Guard's presence in the Gulf of Mexico and hosts a massive training ground for the Army at Fort Johnson, formerly Fort Polk.
The state's law, which went into effect in January, aims to make it difficult for children to access pornography. In practice, it mostly impacts the top pornography sites, which are those most likely to worry about compliance, one being Canadian-owned Pornhub. The site is the 12th most visited in the U.S., with some metrics showing it outperforming Netflix and Amazon.
The adult company, which also serves as an umbrella for other major pornography websites, argues that viewers will simply go to niche sites, which may be less secure and have more extreme and sometimes illegal content. Some critics of the Louisiana legislation also argue that, even if those niche sites do comply with the law, they could have access to personal information through the government's verification system.
"Unfortunately, the way many elected officials have chosen to implement these laws is haphazard and dangerous," a spokesperson for Pornhub said in a statement to Military.com. "Our traffic in Louisiana dropped approximately 80%. These people did not stop looking for porn. They just migrated to other corners of the internet that don't ask users to verify age, that don't follow the law, that don't take user safety seriously, and that often don't even moderate content."
Utah, Mississippi and Virginia passed similar laws in recent months. Virginia has one of the largest military populations in the country. Pornhub has blocked access to its sites in all three of those states, saying they cannot comply with the law because the states do not have adequate digital verification in place.
Henson says that access to pornography websites is both helpful when her husband is away and when they are together "as part of date night." She said she's surprised that something that's so intimate between her and her husband is being controlled by the state.
"I thought the South was supposed to be small government, but that doesn't seem to be the case," Henson said.
-- Steve Beynon can be reached at Steve.Beynon@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevenBeynon
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