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Pornhub shut itself down in Utah because it refuses to
verify the age of users to protect children
LAILA MICKELWAIT
Founder and CEO, Justice Defense Fund
Pornhub shut itself down in Utah because it refuses to verify the age of users to protect children.
The Utah Senate recently unanimously passed a child protection bill (Utah SB 287) requiring pornography sites like Pornhub and xHamster to use age verification systems before allowing access to their sites. Pornhub refuses to comply with the new legislation that would keep children off the site and has chosen instead to shut itself down in the state in "protest." Regardless of the reason, Pornhub shutting its crime scene website down anywhere is a huge win for the #Traffickinghub movement.
While sites like xHamster quickly began to comply with Utah’s age verification requirement, Pornhub refuses to abide by the law even though children as young as eight years old are being impacted by access to the content.
In a message on their website, Pornhub misleadingly suggested that providing identification to verify age would "put children at risk." The real reason they do not want to comply with the law was uncovered in an admission by a veteran Senior Manager at Pornhub, where she confessed that age verification “devastates traffic” to the site and hurts their bottom line. You see, the site’s exploitative business model was built on unrestricted access and unrestricted uploads - which inherently includes access to children and uploads of victims.
Days ago, Virginia also signed into law an equivalent requirement for porn sites to verify the age of users to protect children. A similar law passed in Louisiana and went into effect in January. Many other U.S. states have introduced comparable bills and countries like France are taking similar concrete steps.
Pornhub shut down its crime scene in Utah - let’s hope they shut down in Virginia, Louisiana, and everywhere!
It is critical that we not only support common sense laws to keep children from being exploited in front of the screen but also press hard for legislation that will protect children from being abused behind the cameras and again when the abuse is uploaded online. That means we must pass laws that demand reliable, third-party, age, and consent verification for every individual in every video on user-generated porn sites.
Thank you for what you have already done to aid in this fight!
Let’s keep fighting together.
Until justice prevails,
It would appear that Pornhub is counting on a backlash from porn users against the anti-porn laws. If it happens, we need to be just as vocal and aggressive to keep the laws and encourage all states and countries to pass such laws.
Parents hit out at Waldorf school’s explicit sex ed curriculum
featuring graphic pictures: ‘Nauseous’
By Dana Kennedy
May 16, 2023 6:38pm Updated
Parents at the progressive Waldorf School of Garden City, Long Island, are angry and some are threatening to pull their kids out school because of new mandatory sex education for fifth graders that teaches, among other things, oral and anal sex and masturbation — with illustrations.
Part of the new sex ed curriculum, which originated with the Unitarian Universalist Church and is called Our Whole Lives (OWL), was just formally announced to Waldorf parents in March by the school.
It includes a controversial book called “It’s Perfectly Normal” that has been around since the early aughts but which parents say was originally meant for older kids but contains material too graphic for fifth graders.
“It made me physically nauseous,” one mother told The Post.
“There’s a whole page on contraception and vaginal and anal sex and more about how it’s perfectly normal. This is clearly agenda-pushing and it’s so outrageous.”
The Waldorf schools are based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, the 19th-century Austrian philosopher and teacher, who believed more in experiential and gentle teachings rather than disciplined pedagogy.
Steiner believed that “the human being is a threefold being of spirit, soul, and body whose capacities unfold in three developmental stages on the path to adulthood: early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence.”
At the Waldorf School, fifth graders, whose fees are $30,350 a year, learn when reading “It’s Perfectly Normal,” among other things, that “the ancient Greeks thought that love between two men was the highest form of love.”
There is also a section in the book on how children, both of the same gender or of different genders, “may even look at and even touch each other’s bodies. This is a normal kind of exploring and does not necessarily have anything to do with whether someone is or will be straight, gay, lesbian or bisexual.”
Five parents spoke to The Post about the new sex ed curriculum and asked that they not be identified as they said some parents have been “intimidated” and threatened with being labeled as “against diversity” for speaking up.
One mother got upset when speaking on the phone with The Post, saying she feared retaliation from the school where parents sign contracts every February for their children’s enrollment for the following year.
“This school is the one place where they have always let children be children and they used to try to keep them away from social media and television,” another mother said.
“But now this ideology is becoming the forefront of the school’s focus. I’m all for diversity and inclusion but it takes on a whole new tone when your little kids come home lecturing you about pronouns and asking about oral sex.”
One of the many exercises in the OWL curriculum involve explaining to kids how they are incorrect in thinking certain things are solely for one gender.
Teachers distribute “Gender Variation Cards” and kids are encouraged to imagine they woke up one day “with a body and gender identity different” from before.
Parents requested a town hall at the school last month but said they were put off by the “evasive” and “gaslighting” responses by the administrators and faculty, several told The Post.
“My concern is that when ideas are brought up in class repeatedly… it has a certain significance for the child and its now being inserted into the consciousness of the child,” one mother said during the school’s two-hour town hall meeting last month, audio of which was provided to The Post.
She said her 10-year-old is being forced to learn about masturbation after not hearing about it before and it’s having an impact on how she thinks.
“By bringing it up in class, wow, my teacher is talking about this, I better pay attention,” the mother said.
“(Her) play has changed, (her) thoughts have changed, its changed who (she) was as a person, as a 10 year old. When our children bring us something, it’s the time to introduce it, but if you’re forcing it… I don’t want my 10 year old, her play, her thoughts to be different from who she is right now.”
OWL is part of the Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) initiative that was backed by President Obama after he took office and cut most ties with years of abstinence-themed sex education programs in favor of CSE.
The school’s faculty chair, Kelly O’Halogan, told The Post that the book was not used in the classroom.
The Waldorf School of Garden City/Facebook
His administration doled out more than $100 million to Planned Parenthood entities and their partners entities to fund CSE programs throughout the US.
Sharon Slater, co-founder of Family Watch International, said the OWL curriculum used by the Waldorf School in Garden City scored 15 out of 15 possible “harmful elements” in the organization’s analysis.
“This type of curriculum is intended to divide children from their parents’ values,” Slater told The Post.
The Waldorf School of Garden City
The school defended its curriculum in a statement to The Post.
“It’s about values deconstruction. They’re told at a young age they have a right to sexual pleasure and sexual knowledge and it often turns kids against their parents’ views and values on sex and sexuality. The school administrators don’t worry about backlash because they know they have the backing of the Biden Administration.”
A spokeswoman for Undercover Mother, a national collective of parents concerned about what they call the “cartel” of National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) which oversee private schools including the Waldorf schools, said similar sex and gender education are flooding the nation’s private schools.
“The tentacles of NAIS are in school and they are obfuscating, gaslighting and hiding their involvement their oversight of private schools,” she said.
“Parents have no idea why they’re doing these things.
“They can’t pinpoint where this is coming from – on purpose. Schools are no longer in the business of education. They’re in the business of destabilizing kids and making them think of their genitalia all day and they’re hiring activist teachers to go along with it.”
A Waldorf School administrator in Garden City referred The Post to the school’s spokesman who did not respond to specific questions but emailed a statement from Kelly O’Halogan, a faculty chair at the school who the parents The Post spoke to say is leading the push for the new sex education at the school.
“The book in question is an optional, supplementary resource for parents that has never been used in the classroom,” O’Halogan said in the email.
“All of our curriculum is thoughtfully selected, and we welcome collaboration with parents to continue delivering an inclusive and age-appropriate education for our students. We are a school that teaches our students to value the differences in individuals, and we recognize that there is strength and wisdom in our diversity.”
The list of trustees of the school is not visible on the Waldorf school website where it apparently once was.
“The list of trustees are getting scrubbed from school websites because we’re doing deep dives on each trustee to see if they are working on behalf of the institution or if they have another allegiance,” the Undercover Mother spokeswoman said.
“Scrubbing school websites to hide certain information is now being done all over the country.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs anti-LGBTQ laws affecting
gender-affirming care, bathroom use and drag shows
DeSantis signed bills at Christian school on International Day Against
Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia
The Associated Press ·
Posted: May 17, 2023 9:58 AM PDT |
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, seen in a photo taken in Tampa on Nov. 8, 2022, has made anti-LGBTQ legislation a large part of his agenda as he builds toward a Republican presidential campaign. (Octavio Jones/Getty Images)
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis chose a Christian school as his setting for signing bills on Wednesday that ban gender-affirming care for minors, restrict pronoun use in schools and force people to use the bathroom corresponding with their sex in some cases.
Wednesday also marked the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, an annual event held on May 17 that is meant to honour the fight for equality and the efforts to stamp out hate and discrimination against LGBTQ people worldwide.
DeSantis has made anti-LGBTQ legislation a large part of his agenda as he is expected to announce his presidential candidacy in the coming days. He has leaned heavily into cultural divides on race, sexual orientation and gender as he moves to win support from conservative voters who decide Republican primary elections.
He signed the bills in front of a cheering crowd at the Cambridge Christian School in Tampa.
The ceremony had a campaign-like feel, as opposed to when he signed measures on abortion and gun rights in private.
"It's kind of sad that we even have some of these discussions," DeSantis told the crowd as he stood behind a lectern with a sign that read "Let Kids Be Kids."
"We never did this through all of human history until like, what, two weeks ago? Now this is something? They're having third graders declare pronouns? We're not doing the pronoun Olympics in Florida," DeSantis said to applause.
Republic Rep. Randy Fine, who sponsored the ban on gender-affirming care for minors, invoked his religion to defend the state's actions.
"God does not make mistakes with our children," he said.
Democrats opposed the bills, and LGBTQ rallies were held at the Capitol during the session that ended two weeks ago, but Republicans have a super majority in both chambers and the bills easily moved through the legislative process.
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