SALT LAKE CITY – I went to Utah once, on a family trip. My dad got pulled over for doing 57 in a 55 zone, we ate at a Denny’s, visited a few canyons filled with impressive and colorful rock formations, looked at some tacky church architecture and got the hell out of there before yet another person could corner us to talk about how great some guy named “Joe Smith” was back in the day.
Honestly, I haven’t really thought much about Utah since that trip, except when they were busy getting their ass kicked by the Chicago Bulls in the NBA finals two years in a row. I’ll give the Utah legislature of the ’90s this much, though: They never passed a “concurrent resolution” declaring the Bulls a menace to their state’s basketball fans.
As you know, the Utah legislature recently declared porn a public health crisis, claiming it “perpetuates a sexually toxic environment,” among other things.
I was a little worried when I heard about this resolution, because there’s an outside chance I’ll need to masturbate while I’m in the state of Utah someday. But then I read the page of the legislature’s website that explains the difference between various types of resolutions (simple, joint and concurrent) and I found this statement:
“Except for joint resolutions amending the Utah Constitution, resolutions generally have no force of law. They are considered an expression of the Legislature and are printed in the annual session laws (Laws of Utah) but are not codified (i.e. placed in the Utah Code).”
In other words, this resolution is just a way for a bunch of legislators to sound like they’re doing something about the “porn problem” without going through the messy process of actually doing anything.
Obviously I’m no legislator, but if somebody were to convince me a product being consumed in my home state “increases the demand for sex trafficking…and child pornography,” I think I’d feel compelled to at least apply the usual American solution to any perceived problem and proceed to bomb the shit out of someone — probably Iraq, because I’m a traditionalist that way.
Here’s the thing, though: If the Utah legislature is like any other organization that involves adult human males, at least a few of these motherfuckers watch porn on the regular — and at least one of them (actually, probably the guy who sponsored the bill) watches it while wearing his wife’s old wedding dress and smearing peanut butter on his nuts for his dog to lick off.
Since even a guy who jerks off while wearing his wife’s wedding dress knows banning porn isn’t as easy as simply passing a law to that effect, the next best thing is to pass a meaningless resolution that includes some vague language recognizing “the need for education, prevention, research and policy change at the community and societal level” and call it a taxpayer-funded day.
No doubt, this resolution will be cited by anti-porn groups and activists as “proof” of their claims about porn’s negative impact on society, but until or unless someone tries to address those alleged detriments in a legally binding form, the Utah legislature’s resolution is just more noise and hand-wringing in the ongoing “culture war” — a war to which most people, frankly, aren’t paying much attention at this point.
If and when Utah decides to pass laws aimed at prohibiting the distribution of porn in the state — or does anything more concrete than issuing a glorified legislative press release — you can bet your house the law will be challenged, vigorously, and not just by attorneys representing members of the porn industry, but also by the ACLU, which will be called in to represent entities that don’t make or distribute porn directly but will find themselves subject to the law nonetheless.
This outcome isn’t assured solely because porn presumptively enjoys the protection of the First Amendment, but because you can be pretty certain the Utah legislature, or any other legislature that takes up the question, will craft a statute too broad, too vague and too sweeping not to implicate material no reasonable person would describe as “porn.”
We know legislatures will write a flawed bill because they always write flawed bills when restricting access to porn is the goal, whether the relevant legislation is called the Child Online Protection Act, the Communications Decency Act, or the “Let’s All Try To Look Like We’re Doing Something Real About Naughty Movies that Upset Our More Socially Conservative Constituents Act.”
By the way, if you’re not convinced resolutions like this are meaningless political theater, here’s another oh-so-timely resolution passed by Utah just last year — a concurrent resolution supporting Vietnam veterans.
Yes, just in time to continue ignoring the needs of current combat veterans returning from Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, last year Utah passed a resolution that extended “a heartfelt, belated welcome home and expression of gratitude to all Vietnam War military personnel.”
That’s a great — if 40 years overdue — welcome home, guys. Real nice.
While you’re at it, can you spare some change for a homeless vet, or maybe take some sort of real action to address the famously fucked-up Veterans Administration system?
Never mind; we already know the answer. We’ll just wait for the concurrent resolution of legislative apology to come in 2055.
