Clark’s anti-porn bill passes out of Senate committee

A bill that would prohibit state employees and elected officials from spending public dollars at hotels that offer customers access to violent pornographic movies passed unanimously out of a Senate committee this afternoon. The measure, introduced by Sen. Tarryl Clark, DFL-St. Cloud, cleared the Senate’s State and Local Government Operation and Oversight Committee and will proceed directly to the floor.

“Let me be clear: this bill is not about policing people’s personal choices,” Clark said of the proposal. “This bill is about taking another step in reducing sexual violence in our society.”

The legislation allows for state employees to ignore the prohibition if there’s no porn-free facility available. But they’re required to provide a written explanation as to why they opted to stay in a hotel providing access to pornographic materials. The legislation defines that term as “a sexually explicit image or performance that objectifies or exploits its subjects by eroticizing domination, degradation, or violence.”

Jeanne Martin, co-chair of the Minnesota Coalition Against Sexual Assault’s public policy committee, testified that 61,000 Minnesota residents are sexually assaulted each year and that such violence costs the state $8 billion annually. She also told legislators that there’s a strong correlation between the prevalence of pornographic materials and sexual violence.

“Changing a public health problem of this proportion is no easy task,” Martin said. “We can’t simply prosecute or jail our way out of this problem.”

Only one person testified against the bill. Francis Jenkins White told legislators that sexual role play involving blindfolds or handcuffs is perfectly natural and should not be regulated in any way by the state. “The bill is a classic case of trying to regulate someone’s thoughts and desires,” he said.

The only senator who expressed some misgivings about the legislation was Claire Robling, GOP-Jordan. She noted that pornography is all over the Internet and that the legislation would do little to limit access to such materials. “Someone coming in with a computer could still be viewing it,” Robling said.

But ultimately the bill passed on a unanimous voice vote.

2 Responses to “Clark’s anti-porn bill passes out of Senate committee”

1. teresa qualy Says:
   March 11th, 2010 at 7:02 pm

   Regarding Senator Clark’s billL

   Who defines what pornography is?

   What is privacy?

   Shouldnt the bill be about not reimbursing state employees, state legislators, commissioners, state officers IF they pay for viewing porn? and/or should they be fired for it?

   We are more against horriblly violent video games & movies, that is what we deem pornographic.

   Maybe the bill should be about downloading those when on taxpayer time?

   Senator Clark’s bill is a political no-win for either Party. It is a classic “Senator, when did you stop beating your wife?”

   Teresa D. Qualy (DFL)
   and
   Michael D. Qualy(GOP)

2. Joseph Miller Says:
   March 11th, 2010 at 8:21 pm

   To be clear, Mr. Jenkins-White was at the committee meeting representing me, Joseph Miller.

   Furthermore, your representation of my position misses the point. You’re conflating the argument that, first, it’s bad to pass legislation to stigmatize a legal form of entertainment, and the second point where it stated that the language of the bill itself was vague and could include the portrayal of healthy sexual experimentation such as the use of blindfolds and handcuffs.

   Ultimately this is really about propagating legislation founded upon a false (or at least unproven) premise. In an email to me, Rep. Larry Haws (author of the House companion bill) echoed the statement that “Recent research points to a high correlation between pornography that links explicitly sex and violence and attitudes that lead to sexual violence. The relationship between violent porn and subsequent aggressive behavior is stronger statistically than the relationship between smoking and lung cancer.” but has failed to provide me with the citation for this research. Nor was the actual study or studies mentioned by Sen. Clark, Mrs. Martin, or Mr. Derry (who also testified on behalf of the bill). The “Clean Hotel” standards that started all this (http://www.cleanhotels.com/why-book-here.asp) are also void of any reference to any evidence whatsoever.

   Finally, after the testimony, Sen. Clark admits that the ultimate effect is to remove all pornographic pay-per-view materials not just the ones captured by the bills language. The state (through “purchasing power” or whatever you want to call it) is stigmatizing a legal form of entertainment, and effectively causing it to be censored by any hotel that wants to garner any state money.

   I believe it is wrong to pass any piece of legislation, no matter how limited, that operates on such a huge assertion that the consumption of sexual imagery leads directly to sexual violence without providing the evidence to back that claim up.