Hang on to your magic underwear, people of Utah. Your state government has officially declared pornography a “public health hazard.” State Senator Todd Weiler sponsored the resolution, telling the Salt Lake Tribune, “Seventy years ago people said tobacco’s not addictive and it’s not harmful. That’s what some people are saying about pornography today.” Signed by the state’s governor, Gary Herbert, in April, the resolution blames porn for a long list of social ills, from “lessening desire in young men* to marry” to causing “biological addiction” leading to “risky sexual behaviors, extreme degradation, violence, and child sexual abuse images and child pornography.”
You’d think a person from Utah—home to the nation’s top consumers of porn, according to a 2009 Harvard study—could at least define porn, especially if that person is the same twit who came up with the resolution. But Weiler, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, can’t: “We don’t get into the nitty gritty of saying Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition versus graphic, violent sex on the Internet, so we’re just calling it pornography. We can let people draw their own conclusions as to what that is.”
