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In "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," Hogwarts stops teaching a proper Defense Against the Dark Arts class and leaves the student wizards and witches to work it out on their own. With troublesome results.

In the Utah House of Representatives, a committee last week blocked a bill to allow public schools to create, and students with parental permission to take, a real human sexuality course.

That would just be another day at the office for Utah's Dolores Umbridge and the dementors. Except, also last week, the Utah Senate passed a resolution declaring that pornography is a is a "public health crisis." Utah's Voldemort is Real bill.

The sponsor of SCR9 is Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross. He makes no attempt to ban pornography, and no claim that he could if he wanted to.

In fact that's the whole point of his resolution. Porn is everywhere. It always has been, but modern media makes it more so. So we need to be aware of it and do what we can to mitigate the damage.

Weiler made no attempt to define pornography. But some of the sub-genres the Senate worries about do include stuff that is not artistic or enticing — that is, the single most wonderful thing about being human — but brutal, degrading and objectifying to humans of both genders and all sexual proclivities.

Weiler's goal is just to make people aware of the problem and hope to protect children from the worst of it. Just as we do with other things that are legal for adults but not good for youngsters. Like tobacco and booze.

OK, fine. You can think, like a lot of drive-by commentary from around the country, that Weiler's bill is silly at best, a threat to the First Amendment at worst. And it probably is.

But do the man the honor of taking him seriously for a moment, as Wednesday's 24-0 vote of the Senate did, and wonder this:

If sexual, sexualizing, sexually brutal and demeaning images and information are a problem, then why didn't the House Education Committee Tuesday advance a bill that would add real sex education to the curriculum of Utah public schools?

Because, according to those who voted and spoke against Rep. Brian King's House Bill 246, teaching young people about sex makes them want to go out and do it.

So the Utah Senate thinks unhealthy sexuality — a troublesome fraction of the human condition — is dangerous. And the Utah House thinks that any effort to promote healthy sexuality — a key to healthy everything else — is dangerous.

Both bodies are dominated by conservative, religious Republicans. Which makes the cognitive dissonance involved downright deafening.

It doesn't matter whether Weiler's pornophobic resolution is reasonable or not. The fact is that even if you could turn off all of the age-inappropriate sexual advertising and propaganda he understandably worries about, humans deal with an evolutionarily embedded biological urge that maddeningly conflicts with the modern social pressure to not do it until you've finished law school.

Real sex ed — not the abstinence-based approach that is useless for most carbon-based life forms — is just what Weiler and the rest of the Senate want. Or would if they thought it through. It would do what can be done to slow down the dangerous interaction of hard-wired urges and youthful ignorance before they result in rape, pregnancy, disease or just plain anguish.

King's bill would have been an opt-in, meaning that no Utah public school student could be dragged to sexual enlightenment without a parent's written consent. And no law will ever deprive any parent of the right to explain to their children their own view of the moral, ethical and spiritual aspects of sexuality. Up to and including Don't. You. Dare.

Human sexuality in school is no different than English, shop or trigonometry. It is taught by professionals rather than by parents because teaching is difficult and best done by people who know how. If you, as a parent, can do it just as well yourself, or do it better, or add nuances and deeper understanding, bring it.

If you can't, well, that's what schools are for.

George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, has reached the age where he is pleasantly unconcerned by the fact that Playboy magazine has stopped publishing photos of nude women. gpyle@sltrib.com