Treat Porn ‘Epidemic’ Like We Did Tobacco, Utah Republican Proposes

Last April, Utah passed a resolution declaring pornography a “public health hazard.” The bizarre antic offered no remedy for this imagined scourge, nor any binding legislative action, but simply an assertion that porn leads “to a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts and societal harms.”

Now the proverbial other shoe has dropped. Sen. Todd Weiler (R-Woods Cross), who sponsored last year’s porn resolution, said he will soon introduce new legislation that would allow Utah residents who imagine themselves addicted to porn to sue the websites where they watch it.

“I’m trying to kind of track the same path that was taken against tobacco 70 years ago,” Weiler told Utah’s KSL.com. “I’m looking at where we can push the envelope as a state of Utah. To pretend that this is not having any impact on our youth, on children’s’ minds as they’re developing, as their attitudes towards sex and the opposite sex are being formed, I think is foolish.”

Weiler fancies his solution a libertarian one.

“It’s not government coming in and saying what you can and can’t watch,” he said. “It’s just basically a message to the pornography industry that if someone in Utah can prove damages from the product, that they may be held liable financially.”

It’s easy to laugh at melodramatic musings like Weiler’s and at such tone-deaf dealings as the Utah porn resolution. But this silly “porn as public health crisis” meme seems to now be spreading to other states, egged on by folks at the group formerly known as Morality in Media.

Last week, Virginia State Delegate Bob Marshall (R-Prince William) proposed legislation declaring porn a “public health crisis” that has reached “epidemic” proportions, the evidence of which can be seen by the fact that teenagers are—gasp—texting each other sexy pictures. (Because everyone knows that before ubiquitous internet porn, puberty-racked adolescents walked uphill both ways to and from school and never saw themselves as sexual beings…)

Despite the feverish paranoia of conservative lawmakers like Weiler and Marshall, many in the Republican rank-and-file think their party’s obsession with issues like pornography is out of touch and misguided. Check out what delegates at the 2016 Republican National Convention had to say about porn’s alleged public-health-hazard status in the video below.