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One particularly stupid piece of proposed legislation was supposed to die last week, but my deadline appeared before I could find out whether a state senate committee had performed its proper duty by killing House Bill 1376.
According to its summary, the bill would have required
the governing body of each public library and school
district ... to adopt and implement a policy of internet
safety for minors.
It would require libraries to set up filtering software
so that persons under 18 could not view, unless they had
permission from the librarian to engage in legitimate
research, material that is harmful to minors.
And what is harmful? According to the bill, any
picture, image, graphic image file, or other visual
depiction that ... appeals to a prurient interest in
nudity, sex, or excretion.
There's more, of course. Any visual depiction
that, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary,
artistic, political, or scientific value to minors
is
also harmful, and so are graphic acts of
violence.
There is, of course, not a shred of direct evidence anywhere that looking at racy pictures causes harm to minors or anyone else.
Granted, a visit to hotsluts.com might inspire lascivious thoughts in 16-year-old boys, but so might a glance at the lingerie ads published in this newspaper by various department stores. So might a Sunday School lesson that mentioned David and Bath-Sheba, or Salome and Herod, or the bride in Song of Solomon.
In fact, it's pretty hard to think of anything that could be guaranteed not to inspire lewd thoughts in hormone-infested 16-year-old boys. If they were really endangered by material that could arouse them, then the legislature would have to make arrangements to lock them all in sensory-deprivation tanks through adolescence and perhaps beyond.
So, under the guise of protecting minors from
harm,
our legislature was considering a bill that did
no such thing, since there's no evidence that looking at
pictures on a computer screen is harmful, unless it leads
to a strained neck or the like, and you know our
legislature will never pass any workplace ergonomic
regulations -- that, after all, would address real physical
harm.
Indeed, when it comes to protecting minors from harm, the legislature seems to work overtime to insure that actual physical harm is ignored, while imaginary potential threats get rabid attention.
For instance, hardly a session goes by without further efforts to protect minors from marijuana: increased penalties for distribution to minors, search policies that would make the old KGB blush, drug-free zones in and around schools (the same schools that often collect money from soft-drink companies which pay for a campus monopoly on the sales of tooth-rotting caffeine-spiked beverages).
And yet, in all of human history, not one person has ever died of a marijuana overdose. To put this another way, peanuts kill more children every year than marijuana ever has. But where does the protection effort go?
Or we could consider high-school football. From 1982 to 1996, 374 students either died or suffered catastrophic injuries playing football.
That works out to about 30 deaths or permanent severe disabilities a year, and it means football isn't especially dangerous -- household accidents kill and maim many more kids.
But still, if it is the General Assembly's duty to protect teenagers, then what should they be protected from? Something known to cause serious hard and death, like football, or something never proven to cause any physical harm, like transient glowing phosphors on a piece of glass?
For that matter, in an average year, 10 children die in school bus accidents, and another 25 die walking or bicycling to and from school, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Again, that's not especially dangerous in a statistical sense -- but going to and from school does cause more fatalities than looking at pictures, and that's what H.B. 1376 wanted to protect children from.
And even if you agree that children need such protection, most school and public libraries in Colorado already have policies in place. The librarians, after all, are accountable to local elected officials like school boards and city councils.
Taxpayers often make it clear that they prefer that their money not be spent on ways that expedite the delivery of pornography, and local bodies adjust, without the help of any legislative straitjacket like H.B. 1376.
But our General Assembly was busy last week, trying to protect children from a threat that isn't a threat, and even if it were, protection is already in place in most school and public libraries.
Don't they have anything better to do, or were they just resting up before finding a way to give our money to Boeing?
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