• GOP Senator Mike Lee has proposed a bill that would redefine obscenity and could shake up the porn industry.
• Lee’s bill targets content that has the “objective intent to arouse, titillate, or satisfy a person’s sexual desires.”
• The Free Speech Coalition, which represents the adult film industry, said the bill threatened the livelihoods of performers.

Republican Senator Mike Lee has introduced a measure that some in the adult film industry say could redefine obscenity and upend the Internet porn industry.

Lee from Utah presented the page invoice, entitled Interstate Obscenity Definition Act, on December 14. The bill would “establish a national definition of obscenity that would apply to obscene content” transmitted online.

“Obscenity is not protected speech under the First Amendment and is prohibited from interstate or overseas transmission under U.S. law. But obscenity is hard to define (let alone prosecute) under the Supreme Court’s current test for obscenity,” the bill reads.

Although it is currently legal to produce pornography in the United States, the Supreme Court has established a set of standards for determining whether material is obscene, which is not legally protected. According to three-part testmaterials are considered obscene if they appeal to “lustful interests”, depict “sexual behavior in a patently offensive manner”, and lack “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value”.

Lee’s bill would pass the same test but remove the second prong on portraying sex in a “patently offensive manner”. Instead, his bill says the materials would be obscene if they depict “actual or simulated sexual acts with the objective intent to arouse, titillate, or gratify a person’s sexual desires.”

The bill was introduced in the Senate on December 14, according to Congress. recordings. He has yet to find any co-sponsors.

A spokesperson for Lee did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment on Saturday.

Members of the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association that protects the rights of actors in the adult film industry, criticized Lee’s bill on Thursday Tweeter, saying it would “remove First Amendment protections from pornography and effectively prohibit the distribution of adult material in the United States”.

—Free Speech Coalition (@FSArmy) December 15, 2022

Mike Stabile, director of public affairs for the Free Speech Coalition, also said VICE News that the bill “has received a great deal of attention”.

“Our members understand this for what it is: it’s a threat to their business, to their livelihood. It’s a threat to their community,” Stabile said, according to VICE.