TALLAHASSEE, Fla.—Adult industry trade group the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) officially dropped a federal lawsuit it filed challenging the state of Florida's age verification law.
U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker for the Northern District of Florida accepted a motion to dismiss on Tuesday, a day after the attorneys representing FSC filed the motion. Justification for the dismissal is directly linked to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling late last month that found age verification to be constitutional in Texas.
The FSC and the parent companies of the world's largest adult tube sites sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a far-right anti-porn Republican, to block his state's age verification law. After early success at a lower district court, the case, Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton, was subject to judicial review by the high court.
The conservative majority on the high court voted 6-3 to render Texas House Bill 1181 as constitutional under an intermediate scrutiny legal doctrine. Typically, cases that deal with the First Amendment are subject to something called strict scrutiny, but the high court decided to buck decades of case law and apply a much lower standard.
The FSC's director of public policy, Mike Stabile, told the Tallahassee Democrat that the organization faces "significantly reduced" chances of success in the Florida lawsuit.
"However, we are continuing to the monitor the governmental efforts to restrict adults' access to the internet in Florida," Stabile told the Democrat. "The Paxton decision does not give the government carte blanche to censor content it doesn't like."
Inquiring as to whether FSC intends to withdraw other lawsuits targeting age verification laws filed in federal district courts around the country, Stabile told AVN that the outfit's legal team and leadership are "looking at the other states in light of the ruling to understand the strongest path forward."
