Utah- It’s no secret that there has been some tension between the Utah Legislature and the attorney general’s office over the years. But for lawmakers to make Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, or some unfortunate underling, start cruising the Internet in search of Utah-based pornographic Web sites seems an act of cruel and unusual punishment. Cruel, unusual and pointless. Though they know they cannot regulate the vast majority of Internet traffic, because it does not originate in Utah, House members Thursday unanimously approved Rep. John Dougall’s House Bill 260 in hopes of setting an example for the rest of the country. That example is to command the attorney general to create an “adult content registry,” a list of dirty Utah-based Web sites that the state’s Internet service providers would have to block from the home computer of any customer so requesting. The criteria for making the list would be that the material on the Web site is “harmful to minors.” And that, by existing state law, has nothing to do with drugs, bombs, gangs or other destructive behavior. It means only images of human genitals, female breasts or anything that “appeals to the prurient interest in sex of minors.” Given that prurient interests in healthy teenagers are deep and easily evoked, such a label would not necessarily be limited to the hard-core porn that rightly concerns most parents. A strict reading might cause the forbidden list to include such frivolities as the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Or, depending on who draws the assignment, their personal offense threshold and the degree to which they have been desensitized by days or weeks of reviewing adult material, an adult registry reviewer could just as easily pass some pretty sleazy stuff that, by comparison to the 115 sites he or she looked at this morning, didn’t seem so bad. Web site operators, meanwhile, would be left with a choice of satisfying the cleanliness criteria of one state elected official, or his deputy, with no provisions for appealing their aesthetic judgment, or risk having their entire site blocked by unthinking filters that will search only for the A.G.’s scarlet letter. The bill also appropriates $100,000 for a public service ad campaign to warn parents of the dangers of the Internet and make them aware of steps they can take to protect their families from those dangers. A proper thing for such advertisements to tell parents is that they cannot trust anyone else to monitor their family’s Internet use for them. Not even the poor deputy attorney general who draws the mind- and libido-numbing assignment of building what can only be a flawed list of forbidden destinations.