>No need to make excuses for parents not managing and supervising their kids. If a parent is concerned about sexuality or porn, it is their job to talk with their kids, tell them what they expect, and manage their environment.

I agree that parents need to be involved. The problem is people don't take the position that because parents should be involved that means we shouldn't have laws about it on many other topics. How many people are advocating the removal of laws against 5 year olds smoking or drinking? Just because parents have a responsibility doesn't mean that laws should also not be in place. We mandate IDs be shown for buy cigarettes and alcohol. We can do the same for porn.

>So if they are so worried, they should make the effort to find out how to lock down their kids computer and phones that they personally bought and handed to them.

I agree. The problem is the child may be using a device they don't own.

>Just a little more effort, and they can (or someone they pay to can) lock the devices down, prior to giving it to them.

Doesn't work well. Who are they going to go to if they don't know anybody who is tech savvy? The parents will end up buying some software that is probably doing something sketchy.

Even if a parent blocks porn sites, non porn sites have porn. Google, Bing and other sites have porn on them. I don't think you can enforce safe mode in the search engines without changing DNS (I could be wrong). The average person has no clue what a router is, much less how to log in and change their DNS settings.

>Parents (not the state) should also be periodically checking their kid's phones and computers too. Not just for sex, but anything else they find objectionable (violence, guns, weird messages from unknown people, etc...) and may need to talk to them about.

I agree parents should be doing it. To reiterate one of my previous points, if a child is sending nudes to some random 40 year old should that be legal? Since you think the state shouldn't be involved with these things and it should be fully on the parents to enforce their own rules, you think it should be legal right?

>That is illogical. By the same measure, their kid can see people having sex at their friend's house too or be handed a sex book/magazine. Sex and depictions of sex can happen anywhere, not just on a device.

Devices are the easiest, most accessible, and most frequent way though. I'm guessing most parents don't have sex when their kid's friends are over as well. Even if they do, they would almost certainly stop the moment they saw the kid looking at them.

It feels like you have such a defeatist attitude. We can't stop kids from smoking so we should just make it legal for them to buy and smoke cigarettes? It just doesn't make sense. We can have some laws to make it harder for kids to do certain things.

>If the parents don't trust the people they are allowing their kids to go visit, then maybe it's time to not allow them to go there or talk to the other parents.

I agree, the problem is how easy it is for a small slip up. You can't really expect parents to stand in the same room as the kids every second.

>These types of actions, of managing where and what kids do, are the primary job of the parents and not the state.

I agree it is the primary job of the parents. I am asking for the secondary job to be on the state.

>The context of the argument, is that on computing devices, parents have the means to lock them down. If they don't know how, they can find out or request the services of people that do know how to do it.

I addressed this above.

>Otherwise, if they are so worried about them seeing sex on such devices, then don't give them to their kids.

And how do you solve the school problem? When I was at school, the way they blocked sites is by setting a proxy in internet explorer. To bypass it you would install a browser on a flash drive and then just browse using that browser. They didn't enforce the proxy be used with other browsers. I'm sure schools are better now a days, but kids find ways to bypass blocks all the time.

>The answer to the question is not to turn the entire world into a nanny and police state.

Very few people think requiring an ID for alcohol, cigarettes, guns, etc mean we live in a nanny and police state. Why is porn any different?