Lawmakers' obscenity purge focuses on wrong targets

Yahoo

28-02-2025

Iowa lawmakers are trying to scrub obscenity from public libraries. (Stock photo by Daniel de)
The Iowa Legislature wants to keep sexually explicit materials out of the hands of minors. That seems like a reasonable enough goal, but lawmakers are going about it wrong.
A bill moving through the Iowa House, House File 274, wants to scrub any potential obscenity from public schools and libraries.
As state law stands, public schools, libraries, and educational programs are allowed to use 'appropriate material for educational purposes' without being subject to obscenity penalties.
This doesn't mean teachers can screen pornographic films or hand out smutty romance novels. It means health teachers can show diagrams of the human reproductive systems. It means English teachers use literature that deals with themes of the challenges of adolescence such as the onset of the menstrual cycle described in Judy Blume's classic 'Are You There, God? It's Me Margaret.'
Lawmakers say this isn't their target. They want to get rid of stuff that panders to prurient interest, basically sexual material designed to arouse rather than inform. Reasonable people can agree that's a good idea.
But for a Republican-controlled legislature, the targeting of schools and library is incredibly poor marksmanship. The idea that minor children are using schools and libraries as even a tertiary source for obscene material is laughable.
I'm in my third year of teaching middle school English. This was the first year anyone asked me how to check out a book from the school library.
I've had to stop more students from writing curse words and drawing crude depictions of male genitalia in books than I've ever had to ask a kid to stop reading books other than the required text.
I had one student who tried to read manga comics instead of the required text. It pained me some to make the student put it away. I hid comic books between the covers of my social studies textbooks in Mrs. Mathis' class at Winterset Middle School. It looked like I was studying the difference between temperate and tropical forests, but I was really reading Spider-Man latest battle with the Hobgoblin.
A thousand years ago, back in the 1980s, a kid had to work to get their hands on materials pandering to the prurient interest. You had to have a buddy whose dad wasn't careful with where he left the Playboy magazines or a friend whose mom got the Victoria's Secret catalog.
Even then I didn't go to the library to find pictures of naked women. I went to the library to play 'Oregon Trail' game on the Apple IIe and check out books on the history of newspaper comics. Yeah, I was always this big of a nerd.
Much has changed since the 1900s. Kids who want to see obscene materials don't go to school or library to get it. They just pull their internet-connect smartphone out of their pocket.
Lawmakers move bills aimed at stopping minors' access to obscene materials, porn
As much as one-fifth of internet searches on mobile devices are for adult content, according to a Columbia University study. And that data only related to adults ages 18-35. Common Sense Media reports as many as 60% of teenagers come across the adult material while using their smartphones without actively searching for it.
Other students say as many as 20% of older adolescents deliberately access adult websites on their smartphones. I'd wager, at least as it comes to boys, about 79% of the rest are lying.
The only thing HF 274 will do is make it easier for the most puritanical members of communities to tie up teachers and librarians in court procedures and potentially get them slapped with fines.
Instead of picking on underfunded schools and libraries and underpaid teachers and librarians, the members of the Iowa General Assembly should think bigger. Go full China. Shut down the internet in Iowa. Replace it with a service that tells the people what a good job the government is doing protecting them from all the evils of the world.
I am not what anyone who knows me would describe as an optimist, but I choose to believe that's not what lawmakers really want to do.
The solution lies with families taking a more active — and if so desired — stricter approach to what media their kids consume, what they access on their technology, and how many hours a day they're on those devices.
Lawmakers are considering a bill that would require age verification for websites that post pornographic and obscene materials. That might help, but our school has a robust system to block many websites. The students quickly master the way around them. Again, the burden falls less on government and more on families and caretakers to set standards and limit device time.
This isn't a solution for government. One would think self-described small-government Republicans would be the first to recognize that.
But it's my experience that politicians of any stripe don't truly want smaller government. They just want to use power of government to push around people who have different ideas than theirs.
This column first appeared on Daniel P. Finney's blog, The Paragraph Stacker on Substack. It is republished here through the Iowa Writers' Collaborative.
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