SALT LAKE CITY – Smoking, drinking to excess and abusing prescription medications long have been considered “public health hazards.” Leave it to Utah to one-up everyone else by venturing into uncharted territory and declaring pornography a public health hazard, too.
On Tuesday, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican, signed the legislature’s resolution calling porn “an epidemic that normalizes violence against women and children and makes men less likely to want to get married.”
According to the resolution, put forward in 2015 by Republican State Sen. Todd Weiler and passed by the legislature in March, “Pornography perpetuates a sexually toxic environment. Efforts to prevent pornography exposure and addiction, to educate individuals and families concerning its harms, and to develop recovery programs must be addressed systemically in ways that hold broader influences accountable.”
Adult industry trade association Free Speech Coalition took extreme umbrage at the resolution’s assertions.
“No reputable, science-based public health organization has labeled pornography a public health crisis,” a late-Tuesday statement from the association noted. “Not the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics or any state health department. The true public health crisis is the lack of adequate, science-based sexual health education in the U.S., perpetuated by socially conservative politicians like these for over 35 years. This has led to unbelievably high STI and HIV infection rates amongst our young, as well as a teenage pregnancy rate of 26 per 1,000 in the USA vs. 6 per 1,000 in Europe. Regressive policies like this will achieve nothing.”
Both Weiler and the governor have been careful to point out, repeatedly, that a resolution is not an outright ban.
“What I am saying is we have taken steps to protect people from tobacco, but we haven’t done that for pornography,” Weiler told NBC News.
“I do believe pornography is addictive,” he added.
To help break “the cycle of addiction,” Weiler said he would like to see internet access in the U.S. restricted in the same way it is in the U.K. There, internet service providers must receive a written request before “flipping a switch” that allows unfettered access to the information superhighway. Without a signed opt-in form, ISPs must block at the root all websites hawking porn, drugs or alcohol; promoting self-harm; transmitting images of violence or otherwise engaging in activities that conceivably might harm children who stumble across them.
The whole resolution business smacks of irony. Home to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormons, Utah is one of the most conservative U.S. states. Nevertheless, a 2009 Harvard study called “Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?” found Utahans among the country’s most gluttonous porn consumers.
On the positive side of Utah legislative news, on Tuesday Gov. Herbert also signed a bill requiring technicians to report child pornography they discover while repairing, upgrading or otherwise mucking around with people’s computers. Failure to comply is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in prison.
