The majority in today's Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton began with the established principle (see Justice Brennan's majority opinion in Ginsberg v. N.Y. (1968)) that certain material may be constitutionally protected for adults but unprotected when distributed to minors:
When regulating minors' access to sexual content, the State may broaden Miller's "definition of obscenity" to cover that which is obscene from a child's perspective. To be more precise, a State may prevent minors from accessing works that (a) taken as a whole, and under contemporary community standards, appeal to the prurient interest of minors; (b) depict or describe specifically defined sexual conduct in a way that is patently offensive for minors; and (c) taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors. [The Miller definition for what can be prohibited even for adults would omit the italicized text from each prong of the test. -EV] …
The majority acknowledged that any age verification requirements "burden" the rights of adults in some measure—whether of the adult distributors (such as the vendor in Ginsberg) who must check patrons' age, or of adult patrons who have to prove their age. But it concluded that, because the speech was restrictable as to children, sufficiently narrow age verification requirements need not be judged under the highly demanding "strict scrutiny" test:
