Utah Lawmakers Crack Down on Porn, Lighten Up on Polygamy

Utah lawmakers are doubling down on their anti-porn stance while, paradoxically, lightening up on polygamists.

It’s an interesting series of events, given that officials in Utah recently announced that their four-year-old resolution declaring pornography a “public health crisis” has had no effect on porn use in the Beehive State. In fact, according to the hilariously dubbed KJZZ.com, “More people are watching porn—and they’re watching it more often.”

But, rather than taking the hint that Utahns want to access legal, consensually made adult entertainment…lawmakers are doubling down. “A bill that requires pornography to carry a warning label about the dangers to youth has passed Utah’s House of Representatives after considerable debate,” reported Salt Lake City’s Fox News channel last Tuesday.

“The new measure is narrowly aimed at hardcore obscene material, but the way the law is written could still allow for thousands of lawsuits,” the Associated Press attributed FSC’s Mike Stabile as saying. “‘Really it just sort of opens up the floodgates for lawsuits over all sorts of content,” he said.

The bill’s wording has been modified to avoid outright violation of the First Amendment, reported Salt Lake City’s Fox News channel last week. “The bill has already been modified to hopefully avoid any kind of a legal challenge. Instead of a legal standard of ‘harmful to minors,’ [Rep. Brady Brammer, the bill’s sponsor] has changed it to what is obscene. That change means someone would have to bring a legal challenge against a porn producer and have their content declared legally obscene. The state, he said, would not be doing that.”

It sounds as if the process for actually making someone pay the $2,500 penalty for not labeling explicit content would be laborious—requiring an obscenity ruling just to determine whether someone had violated the state law in the first place. But Rep. Brammer seems more concerned with the spirit behind the bill than the real-life outcomes: “I think it will make a difference,” Brammer was quoted as saying by TheState.com. “It won’t stop every problem related to obscenity, it will not stop all obscenity, but it will move the ball further down the field.”

In a bizarre twist on this deeply conservative move by the Utah lawmakers, an hour before the porn-labeling bill passed the House, “Senators voted unanimously to change state law to remove the threat of jail time for consenting adult polygamists,” reported the AP. Supporters argue that this step will “free people in communities that practice plural marriage to report abuses, like children being taken as wives, without fear of prosecution.”

An odd dichotomy, this. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for consenting adults following whatever relationship model makes them happiest! Monogamy, bigamy, polygamy—it’s all good with me as long as everybody’s happy. And, if they’re not, they should have full access to legal recourse. So, good on the Utah Senate for nixing jail time for polygamists!

But it seems a tad hypocritical. Utah legislators are giving consenting adults more freedom—when it comes to one man marrying multiple women. (Because, let’s be real, in Utah, in practice, the word “polygamy” is not being applied to one woman marrying multiple men.) But they’re making it more difficult to distribute legally produced explicit entertainment created by consenting adults and intended for purchase and consumption by consenting adults…many of whom are women.

Anybody else seeing a double standard here?

Of course, the porn-labeling law is being touted as a way to keep children from accessing porn. And that’s all well and good. But in practice, if it passes the Senate, it will affect the practices and livelihoods of adult content producers who want to sell their wares in Utah. Those folks are law-abiding adult citizens who have done nothing wrong and will now need to twist themselves into knots to figure out how to sell content in Utah. 

Both bills will now need to pass the legislative houses that haven’t yet voted on them—stay tuned!

Utah photo by Joshua T from Pexels