DES MOINES, IA — A bill pending before the Iowa House of Representative seeks to do more than slap the wrists of parents whose children view “obscenity.”House File 443 requires placement on the state’s child-abuse registry any parent or caregiver convicted of allowing minors “direct or indirect access” to obscene materials
Although supported by a cadre of legislators and conservative groups, the bill and a companion piece of legislation in the state Senate (Senate File 271) hardly are shoo-ins. The American Civil Liberties Union and some vocal state legislators vehemently oppose action that may land parents and caregivers in a legal morass over ill-defined, subjective concepts.
State law defines obscenity as “any material depicting or describing the genitals, sex acts, masturbation, excretory functions or sadomasochistic abuse which the average person, taking the material as a whole and applying contemporary community standards with respect to what is suitable material for minors, would find appeals to the prurient interest and is patently offensive; and the material, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, scientific, political or artistic value.”
The definition could put parents at risk if their children so much as glance at a Playboy magazine while the parent’s back is turned or if kids stumble across porn accidentally on the internet, critics claim.
Supporters of the proposed legislation, on the other hand, say the bills attempt to close a loophole in existing law that exempts parents from accountability in cases of obscenity distribution. Children can be psychologically scarred by exposure to porn, they note, and obscenity puts kids at greater risk of sexual predation. Parents are the ultimate backstop.
Child counselor Kathy Lowenberg, a major proponent of the bills, said she has treated more than 100 minor victims of sexual abuse, and in every case, pornography played a role in the child’s ordeal.
“This legislation isn’t the icing on the cake. It’s the cake,” Lowenberg told The Des Moines Register. “We have to have it.”
ACLU of Iowa Legal Director Randall Wilson said even the best parents sometimes can’t control adolescent hormones.
“This would have the state intervening in families every time a parent drops their guard,” he told The Des Moines Register. “You have adolescent hormones raging here, you have curiosity and I think, truth be told, you would find that a whole lot of kids would qualify as children in need of assistance who belong to perfectly normal families.”
State Rep. Kurt Swaim [D-Bloomfield], who supports the proposed legislation, said porn, not parents, is the true target of the proposed legislation. Codifying parental roles in children’s behavior is just a means to an end.
“There’s been concern on the part of some legislators that if there were inadvertent viewing of material that it might cause some problems, but that’s not the intent of the law,” Swaim told The Des Moines Register. “The intent is to get at hard pornography and things that there should be no reasonable basis for a child to look at.”
Other legislators are not convinced the bills, if passed, wouldn’t sweep innocent people into a net of legal woes.
“We need to do a lot more discussion and be a little more specific about what we mean and the ramifications of it,” Sen. Becky Schmitz [D-Fairfield] told the newspaper.
