Precedent is no longer a reliable guide in how the Supreme Court rules on any given case.
…if the right-wing Supreme Court decides to even hear it.
One thing that I don’t think has been mentioned here is that a huge percentage of anime is set in middle school or high school, for a variety of reasons but mainly because that’s what sells.
That’s why this is called the “anti-anime” bill, because so many shows feature characters somewhere between 16-12. These shows can vary from “frankly depicting the sexual awakenings people this age experience" to “openly leering at underage bodies” and the problem is this bill targets all of them regardless.
The thing is the same people going after this are also going after porn in general.
A lot of you seem to be acting like it would be okay if this law were more narrowly targeted. I do not agree. It crosses the line of what is a valid legal concern. Laws exist primarily to protect the public and secondarily to keep things more fair. This is a law that is about disgust, about enforcing a social taboo. They don’t even try to argue why these laws would improve society: they just rely on oue (entirely understandable) visceral reactions.
And that is the actual motivation used to push all these laws that harm people who are different. Surez there is lip service to the idea it’s about protecting some vulnerable group, or arguing things are unfair, but the real reason they get traction is that it makes people feel bad.
On this issue, it’s just that they can say the quiet part out loud. Surely we must support the actual abuse of children if we think the law should not ban depictions of it.
Hot take: enforcing a social taboo against pedophilia is a good thing.
Yes, it’s a wedge issue. It will both be used to implement broader and broader restrictions, and be interpreted as broadly as possible because the people pushing and enforcing it are dishonest prudes and control freaks who have zero actual concern for children.
Anything other than straight, male-dominant relationships gets regularly labeled “pedophilia” by the anti-porn movement. If you’re gay? You’re a pedophile according to them. Are you a “furry”? Pedophile. Show off an “Asexual Pride” flag? Pedophile.
How is this not in violation of the 1st Amendment for free speech?
Really asking.
Something something community standards?
Then conservatives should stop opposing laws that do that.
From what I see on Wikipedia, the 2003 Protect Act, a federal law, already banned all child porn even if it was completely digitally-created, drawn, and involved no actual human actors in any way. There seems to be little or no dissent to this, and that was 22 years ago. So is this Texas law really any different? Seems like it’s just taking it to its next logical step and applying it to anime.
ISTM you can keep going down this road for anything you want to ban.
I get the pedophilia part since it is so vile and shocks the conscience. That said, where is the line drawn? Not an easy question.
Yet another issue: Characters in anime aren’t always human, and so laws or conventions about human ages aren’t always relevant. Elves might take 100 years to reach maturity; what’s the status of a 70-year-old elf? Kes, from Star Trek: Voyager, despite being played by a fully adult actress with an adult body, was from a short-lived, fast-maturing species, and was canonically only 7 years old. Is it acceptable to depict her in a romantic relationship? A robot can be built with a body of any shape at all, or even no body, and robots are usually depicted as being “adult” as soon as they’re built and activated (certainly, nobody in fiction waits until 18 years after they’re activated to hook up with them). Angels, in some interpretations, are literally ageless: Time, as humans understand it, is irrelevant to them. But there’s plenty of fiction with angels involved in romance.
“No sexual photographs of an actual minor human” is a clear line to draw. “Nothing that’s indistinguishable from a sexual photograph of an actual minor human” is, in some ways, even clearer. But can you figure out where to draw the line with a law like Texas’s? And if you can’t, do you have any business passing the law in the first place?
I’m not sure I’m seeing the slippery slope here, although I agree MAGA has plenty of slippery slopes elsewhere.
If the argument is that MAGA is going to ban all porn next (including legal porn involving adults-only,) they could and would do it without any need to first go after anime.
Not that clear, it means that pictures of small-breasted women risk being labeled “child porn”.
I’ll also point out that there are examples of girls being charged for child pornography because pictures were taken of them.
Skumanick asserted that the girls were accomplices to the production of child pornography because they allowed themselves to be photographed. The threatened charges of sexual abuse of a minor could come with jail time and registration as sex offenders
It should not be assumed that such laws will be enforced in a fair, reasonable way, or with any actual concern for the welfare of children. Children are the excuse, not the point.
Discouraging pedophilia is a worthy goal, but this law has as much to do with stopping pedophilia as a law banning guns in video games would have with stopping murders.
Well said. 
At the cost of encouraging actual pedophilia? Because that’s the pattern with censorship in the name of enforcing taboos; given access to the imaginary version people will taken that and incidents of the real thing go down. For all the talk of “violence in the media” and “sex in the media” encouraging violence and rape in real life, to the extent there’s any evidence access to the media version makes the real thing drop, not increase.
I agree! Why do you think I’d defend them? They’re the party of Matt Gaetz, for one.
If the actress is recognizable, and the porn company has records on file of her age, then the picture is distinguishable from child porn.
You keep saying “porn” but that is a straw man. The things people are withdrawing out of caution are not porn. But the law is so vaguely worded that people don’t know where potential prosecutors will draw the line.