If, as Nelson Mandela posits, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children,” then recent headlines have given us a glimpse into part of America’s soul, and it is dark.
Last week transgendered Minnesota State Rep. Leigh Finke, a two-term Democrat, spoke in opposition to a state-wide legislative effort (HF 1434) to restrict minors’ access to harmful online material, primarily pornography, arguing that pornography could be “educational” for “queer” children.
Transgender Minnesota State Rep Leigh Finke opposes age verification laws for adult sites because he thinks it can be “educational” for kids to access it
This dude is a disgusting creep pic.twitter.com/WWqjzMILW0
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 20, 2026
Finke claimed attorneys general in states with age-verification laws are, “Almost jubilant about being able to use these laws to ban young people from accessing content that could be educational if they are queer.”
Finke continued, “You’re a principal, you have LGBT students in your school, and we also know that they’re not receiving sex education for queer kids, we know that prurient interest could be for many people the very existence of transgender kids. More and more people are saying, there are simply no transgender kids.”
The deliberate use of the phrase “prurient interest” in this context reveals Finke’s real intent here: to normalize exposing children to content that meets the legal definition of illegal obscenity.
That specific phrase was used by the United States Supreme Court in Miller v. California to establish the legal standard for obscenity. The so-called “Miller Test” sets out three criteria for determining if content is legally obscene and therefore not protected by the First Amendment:
1) “Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest.” [Emphasis added]
2) “Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law.”
3) “Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
Pornography is not sex education, and exposing children to it is abuse.
Deliberately exposing a minor to pornography is illegal. Full stop. It has also long been recognized as a boundary-testing “grooming” behavior used by adult predators to normalize inappropriate behavior leading to sexual exploitation.
It would be a grave mistake even for adults to use pornography for sex education.
Pornography is deeply intertwined with and fed by the sexual exploitation industry and relies heavily on women who have been trafficked, coerced, and abused. It is a system that commodifies bodies, normalizes objectification, and often leads to compulsive and addictive behaviors.
Dr. Mary Anne Layden, Co-Director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the Center for Cognitive Therapy of the University of Pennsylvania, testified to Congress that “Pornography, by its very nature, is an equal opportunity toxin. It damages the viewer, the performer, and the spouses and the children of the viewers and the performers. It is toxic miseducation about sex and relationships. It is more toxic the more you consume, the ‘harder’ the variety you consume and the younger and more vulnerable the consumer.”
According to Dr. Layden, pornography use increases the likelihood of addiction, and with it, as with other forms of addiction, escalating behavior: “Sexual addicts develop tolerance and will need more and harder kinds of pornographic material … This material is potent, addictive and permanently implanted in the brain.”
When a child is exposed to pornography, it can permanently rewire their arousal and response patterns. It also normalizes abnormal sex and increases the likelihood that the child will engage in extreme expressions of sexual behavior. According to one report from Australia, “Children who had become sexual predators before the age of 12 all had experienced pornographic material on the Internet and large number believed that the only use of the Internet was for pornographic material.”
LGBTQ Children Would Be Harmed, Not Helped by This Policy
Far from being an advocate for a marginalized community, Finke is promulgating a dangerous lie that puts the very children he claims to be seeking to protect in the way of greater harm.
Minors are uniquely vulnerable online, and those risks fall even more heavily on LGBTQ teens, who face higher rates of online harassment, risky unsolicited messages, and predatory contact in private messaging spaces.
Many of the arguments made by Finke were also made by lobbyists working to block legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).
The Center for Democracy and Technology, for example, argued that:
The poorly drafted ‘Kids Online Safety Act’ would make kids less safe, and would be weaponized to attack LGBTQ+ people and abortion rights.
KOSA would require online services to ‘prevent’ a set of harms to minors, which is effectively an instruction to employ broad content filtering to limit minors’ access to certain online content.
Content filtering is notoriously imprecise; filtering used by schools and libraries … has curtailed access to critical information such as sex education or resources for LGBTQ+ youth.
At a time when books with LGBTQ+ themes are being banned … KOSA would cut off another vital avenue of access to information for vulnerable youth.
But all this is misplaced empathy that does not keep children safe. Any policy discussion that forgets that loses sight of the very people it claims to defend.
Protecting children from obscene and pornographic material should be a non-negotiable priority of any policy discussion in this area. We must fight back at every point against the radical ideas being promoted by Rep. Finke and other pro-LGBTQ+ advocates.
