Judge Robert Pitman said that it violates the First Amendment and is "more likely than not - unconstitutional." The Act is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and, for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to purchase a book. We enjoy 1A protections of speech and assembly. When we consider our rights,…
For those curious about the "consistent principle of law" here - SCOTUS wrestled with nearly exactly this question in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton earlier this year, and effectively emboldened more of these laws. Previously the Fifth Circuit had relied heavily on Ginsberg v. New York (1968) to justify rational basis review. But Ginsberg was a narrow scope - it held that minors don't have the same First Amendment r…
Ginsberg was about burdens on adults. In that case, New York law prohibited the sale of content containing nude images to minors. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a store owner under that law, who had sold magazines containing nude pictures to underage buyers: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1967/47.
Ginsberg acknowledged that the magazines did not qualify as obscenity as to adults--selling the magazines in question to adults was protected First Amendment conduct. So the age checking necessarily required by the law was a burden on those First Amendment protected sales. Ginsberg necessarily found that burden to be a permissible one.