I am all for practical solutions :) Right now Steemit is small and not at all representative of the global population. (And religious does not necessarily mean puritan by the way). The current system to handle NSFW-Bad narighboorhood-adult content is to tag it #nsfw. If this is done as the first tag, the post is hidden - but you can easily see it with a press of the button. So a system already exist, it just doesn't not give complete security for minors and parent who want to control what they see. (it is hard to unsee graphic pornography).

On the other hand you also have to serve the crowd that is actually here, and if you could look at the demographic I believe that you would see a strong liberal/libertarian majority from a rather diverse geographical origin. What I propose is a way to refine the system making it have a hard border to for example hard-core porn , and a softer border that actually just use the existing system. I simply think it would be bad if content that was not sexual in nature had to be on a completely other page. A #nsfw-tag should be enough for this:

I am also on the Diaspora social network and have been for more than 3 years, and even though it's user might be more to the left than users here (or actually more European than American) it does have many similarities to Steemit, and the #nsfw-tag combined with a blocking feature does work well... except for hardcore pornography. The thing you write about US law just support this.

If Steemit is ever big enough there will have to be taken special measures, just like Facebook and the rest does. Censoring Chinese political opinions etc. :(