What will this bill do?

• Prohibits a person from willfully displaying at newsstands or any other business establishment frequented by minors, or where minors are or may be invited as a part of the general public any obscene photograph, book, pamphlet, or magazine.

  • The above does not include at colleges, universities, museums, or art galleries.

  • A person would be guilty of a class C misdemeanor for willfully violating this section.

• Allows a school district, state agency, public library, or university to offer digital or online library database resources to students in kindergarten through twelfth grade if the person providing the resources verifies all the resources do not promote obscenity to minors.

• Ensures that digital or online library database resources offered by a school district, state agency, public library, or university to students in kindergarten through twelfth grade must have safety policies and technology protection measures that:

  • Prohibit and prevent a user of the resource from sending, receiving, viewing, or downloading materials constituting child sexual abuse material, an obscene performance, or pornography

  • Filter or block access to pornography and child sexual abuse material.

• An employee of a school district, state agency, public library, or university is not exempt from prosecution for willful indecent exposure to child sexual abuse material or pornography.
  
  Read the amended bill.

Why is this bill needed?

• The American Library Association, which has a significant influence on public school libraries across the country, are pushing shockingly obscene books to school kids. Click here for one example, but please note it leads to explicit and disturbing content.

• There is a massive quantity of pornography available online, including increasingly graphic and extreme content that is easily accessible to children of all ages. Efforts to regulate content and restrict children’s access to pornography have not kept pace with technological advancements that have profoundly altered and increased the consumption of pornography.

• Pornographic content harms everyone - children and teens especially. Exposure to pornography at a young age leads to poor mental and spiritual health, sexism and objectification, sexual violence, and devastating psychological effects.

• Federal law already prohibits the distribution of obscene material, but the law is clearly not applied or enforced as it should be.