The Supreme Court upheld a Texas anti-pornography law on Friday that is nearly identical to a federal law it struck down more than two decades ago.

Rather than overruling the previous case — Ashcroft v. ACLU (2004) — Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion spends at least a dozen pages making an unconvincing argument that Friday’s decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is consistent with the Court’s previous decisions. Those pages are a garbled mess, and Thomas spends much of them starting from the assumption that his conclusions are true. All three Democratic justices dissented.

That said, Free Speech Coalition makes two very significant changes to the Court’s approach to free speech protections for pornography, and these changes are clearly stated in Thomas’s opinion.

In Ashcroft, the Court struck down a federal law that basically required pornographic websites to screen users to determine if they are over the age of 18. One reason for this decision is that it was far from clear that websites were actually capable of performing this task. As the Court had acknowledged in an earlier case, “existing technology did not include any effective method for a sender to prevent minors from obtaining access to its communications on the Internet without also denying access to adults.”

This mattered because, long before the internet was widely available, the Court had established, in cases involving phone sex lines and televised pornography, that “the objective of shielding children” from sexual material is not enough “to support a blanket ban if the protection can be accomplished by a less restrictive alternative.” These decisions established that adults have a First Amendment right to view sexual material, and this right cannot be diminished in an effort to keep that material from children.

Accordingly, in Ashcroft, the Court ruled that the federal age-gating law must survive the toughest test that courts can apply in constitutional cases, known as “strict scrutiny.” Very few laws survive this test, and the........

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