Utah leaders have long sought to play a central role in the anti-pornography movement, but the state's most well-known attempt to strike down smut did not go so well.
The state's much-lampooned "porn czar" only lasted a few years in the early 2000s before the position was scratched in budget cuts. Last week Utah legislators eliminated the statute permitting the state attorney general to employ such a prosecutor.
"It's not the job of the government to sit in a dark room and review porn," said Utah state Rep. Michael McKell, R-Spanish Fork, the House sponsor of the bill that eliminated the czar — who, he stressed, was not intended to be an obscenity nanny in the first place.