(LifeSiteNews) — On Good Friday, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin vetoed a bill that would have required porn sites to implement age verification in order to protect children from seeing pornography. Governor Tony Evers claimed that this bill was an “intrusion into the personal privacy of Wisconsin residents.”

The law would have banned porn distributors from operating in the state unless they implemented “a reasonable age verification method.” It passed in the Assembly last month by a wide margin—69-22. Almost two dozen Democrats joined their Republican colleagues in voting for it.

Twenty-five states have passed age verification laws to protect minors from pornography so far. Twenty-three of those laws were signed by Republican governors, and two by a Democrat (Katie Hobbs of Arizona and Roy Cooper of North Carolina). The only previous veto was a 2024 version of the Arizona bill; Hobbs signed a revised version in 2025. A Colorado bill was shelved last year after Democratic Governor Jared Polis threatened to veto it.

Age verification laws have not been entirely effective at protecting minors from pornography—especially since pornographic content is now findable on social media and softcore content is almost ubiquitous online—but one 2025 analysis did find a 46-51 percent reduction in online searches and traffic to platforms that have complied with the legislation, such as Pornhub.

In 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Texas age verification law in 6-3.

Additionally, there has been an added perk—as a way of “punishing” states for passing these laws—Pornhub proactively geo-blocked 23 of the 24 sites. Pornhub’s parent company Aylo had vigorously lobbied against the laws, and their decision to cut off access in states with age verification laws has been a happy and helpful side effect.

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Governor Tony Evers is attempting to have it both ways. “While I agree that we should protect children from harmful material, this bill imposes an intrusive burden on adults who are trying to access constitutionally protected materials,” he stated on Apil 3. Evers claimed that his primary concern is that the bill does not ban porn websites from selling the information used to confirm identity.

Similarly to Governor Katie Hobbs in Arizona, however, Evers did indicate that he might be willing to sign a revised version of the legislation. “I am confident Wisconsin can adopt a solution that is effective at protecting youth from adult content while limiting the risks to Wisconsinites’ personal information,” he wrote.

“By hiding his veto on Good Friday, he knows he and [Democrats] are out of step with 70-80% of Wisconsinites, and Republicans and Democrats in dozens of other states that see this bill as an important tool to protect kids from harmful images, while still protecting personally identifiable information,” Senator Van Wanggaard, one of the bill’s co-authors, told the Journal Sentinel.

“Porn is no longer a dirty magazine found under a mattress,” said co-author Representative Joy Goeben in October. “It’s pervasive, hardcore, and easily accessible and it targets our youngest generation to hook them early and keep them addicted.”

“Pornography acts like a drug, and like any drug, it’s particularly harmful to children,” Wanggaard concurred. “The younger exposure begins, the less likely a child will be able to handle the exposure to pornography properly.”

It’s important to note here that age verification laws are the very bare minimum response to the horrific crisis created by ubiquitous porn use. What we actually need are robust porn bans with teeth that genuinely prioritize the safety of children over the perversions of adults. One supporter of such a move—at least, in principle—is Vice President JD Vance.

“The idea that you can’t regulate the internet in a way that protects children is just absurd,” he told me in an interview a number of years ago. “In the scope of American history, the internet is very new and the idea that a 9-year-old can watch a gang-bang on the internet is very, very new. We have to make the argument that it is objectively bad for kids, bad for parents, and bad for society to have an entire population that grows up being exposed to something no generation in American history has been exposed to.”