Should legislators be the ones to police morality?
Over the last few years, I’ve seen too many lawmakers, here in Wyoming and across the country, who claim to be anti-government overreach yet are OK with it as long as it furthers their own agendas.
This week, the Joint Judiciary Committee agreed to table a draft bill that would fine libraries $50,000 for having sexually explicit materials in the children’s section after hearing a lot of pushback from the audience.
The draft bill, “Sexually explicit materials in libraries-requirements,” proposes to require that all staff members or employees of a public library ensure that “no sexually explicit materials are accessible in the children’s section of the library at any time,” with each violation incurring a $50,000 fine for the library.
Predictably, this caused a bit of an uproar among libraries around the state, who worried about the workload and the financial burden this bill would create, as well as confusion over what would constitute a violation.
The committee voted to hold off on moving this bill forward. It will come up again in October. That’s exactly what the interim is for: working out all the kinks in these bills so they’re ready for the big leagues in February.
But some of the lawmakers made some interesting points on why they think this bill is such a great idea.
A legislator from Sheridan brought up Article 7, Section 20 of Wyoming Constitution: Duty of Legislature to Protect and Promote Health and Morality of People, that calls the state’s Legislature to encourage “temperance and virtue” while putting “restrictions upon vice and immorality of every sort, as are deemed necessary to the public welfare.”
In the 1920s, the federal government put heavy restrictions on “vice and immorality,” and as anyone who has studied American history knows, the Prohibition era was a fine and dandy time for this country.
I have a feeling that when the Wyoming Constitution was being written, the authors did not intend for the legislature to be the morality police for the whole state. It goes against the very nature of Wyoming, which has been a “live and let live” state for much of its existence.
Sen. Larry Hicks, R-Baggs, also had some things to say on the bill, bringing up the oft-quoted Miller Test for obscenity. He said that according to this test, community standards trump parents’ standards, but at the same time, he said it’s not the communities, but the legislature, that has the authority on what those standards are.
“Quite frankly, members of this body represent those communities, and we’re sent here to do this,” he said.
The idea of “community standards” is very self-explanatory. The community of Gillette has a different set of standards than Jackson or Sheridan or Miami. It does not mean that legislators get to pick and choose what standards they want these communities to abide by.
Personally, I’d rather see the standards of my community come from people who live here, rather than a group of legislators who live hundreds of miles away in very different communities.
It sounds like Hicks doesn’t trust parents to know what’s best for their children and that he believes that the Wyoming Legislature knows what’s best for these communities. It comes off as incredibly cocky.
Perhaps Hicks doesn’t believe this though. Maybe he just thinks that all communities in Wyoming are the same and should be governed by the same standards. But I didn’t get that vibe from him last summer when he fought for Cody to get the state shooting complex over Gillette. Back then, he was loud and clear about how much better Cody was.
Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe serving in the legislature for years does make you better and smarter than the average taxpayer, and maybe we should not criticize lawmakers because they do know what is best for us and our families.
Many lawmakers aren’t happy with Wyoming being a state where people “live and let live.” They want it to be “live and let live as long as it doesn’t offend me or hurt my feelings.”
But that’s not what made Wyoming great.