DES MOINES — The Republican legislator behind Iowa’s mandatory porn filter bill said that, after realizing that multinational electronics corporations were unlikely to alter phones and other devices to comply with one state law, he was turning his bill into yet another version of the age verification legislation being sponsored around the country by anti-porn religious conservative activists.
State Rep. John Wills (Spirit Lake) told Iowa’s The Gazette newspaper on Tuesday that in the process of running House File 2114, he “learned more about how phones are manufactured and sold.”
Wills added that this new knowledge resulted in a plan “to change the proposal to focus on an age verification requirement for pornography sites, plus an education campaign that teaches parents and children how to create safeguards on phones,” The Gazette Reported.
“What I learned is that, basically, the way this bill is written, we would have to make Apple and Google and all these great, big, worldwide corporations change their practices. Well, they’re not going to do that for Iowa,” Wills said. “So it became very evident that we’re going to have to make some changes to the bill.”
It may seem unusual that Wills would not have realized the utter impracticality of his initial proposal, as he has worked in Iowa politics for almost a decade and is a retired military man who holds a bachelor’s degree in biology and two master’s degrees — in Political Science with an emphasis in National Defense and Environmental Policy and Management — from American Military University.
Wills said his current plan after educating himself about how phones are manufactured and sold is “to model his proposal after an instruction and education program from Florida, and an age verification system recently enacted in Utah,” The Gazette adde.
Regardless of Wills’ own acknowledgement of the unfeasibility of his porn-filter proposal, the two Republicans on a three-member legislative panel advanced HF 2114 on Tuesday, and it is now eligible for consideration by the full House Judiciary Committee.