… OR DOES IT?
We did a post recently on porn’s crackdown against North Carolina. Today, it’s time to look at the state of Utah’s crackdown on porn. Well … it’s not so much a crackdown as it is a spleen-venting.
Utah’s law is purely a “sense of the state” type thing … not binding legislation outlawing porn (the First Amendment would frown upon that).
So what is Utah’s sense of porn? According to the state’s “concurrent resolution on the public health crisis,” it’s not a good sense …
Specifically, concurrent resolution alleges that porn is “creating a public health crisis” in Utah, as well as “a sexually toxic environment.” It is also “contributing to the hypersexualization of teens, and even prepubescent children.”
This leads to “low self-esteem and body image disorders, an increase in problematic sexual activity at younger ages, and an increased desire among adolescents to engage in risky sexual behavior.”
Furthermore, it is Utah’s belief that porn can detrimentally “impact brain development and functioning, contribute to emotional and medical illnesses, shape deviant sexual arousal, and lead to difficulty in forming or maintaining intimate relationships, as well as problematic or harmful sexual behaviors and addiction.”
So … is all of that true?
Who knows … it is interesting to note, though, that a 2009 Harvard Business School study exposed Utah as the state with “the highest per capita purchasers of online adult entertainment.”
Like anything in moderation, the right kind of porn can be good … helpful, even. Like anything in excess, though, porn can be dangerously addictive.
Either way, so long as consenting adults are involved in its production/ dissemination/ consumption … we see no reason for government to engage the debate.