The resolution passed last month, and calls for increased “education, prevention, research, and policy change at the community and societal level,” to battle the “pornography epidemic harming the state and the country.”
Republican State Senator Todd Weiler, who proposed the bill in January, claims that codifying specific legal terminology is not an attack on pornography, but an attempt to “protect children and families.”
“Due to advances in technology and the universal availability of the Internet, young children are exposed to what used to be referred to as hardcore — but is now considered mainstream — pornography at an alarming rate,” the bill says.
The passage of the bill is welcomed by anti-pornography group Utah Coalition Against Pornography.
Weiler hopes his legislation will spread to other states, and suggests that pornography is why divorce is so common.
“If you start with meth or heroin, everyone knows that's addictive,” Weiler told the Atlantic. “A lot of people will get kind of lured into pornography, and they don't know it may actually consume their life.”
Opponents of the bill observe that the language is unnecessarily alarmist, and a product of the stigmatization of sex in the United States.
