"I am going to work through a number of constitutional questions" before pushing HB50, Wyatt said. And he must satisfy himself before proceeding. A similar bill failed in the 2006 session.

The electronic gaming industry places voluntary ratings on its products. Yet critics continue to argue that too often minors can buy M-rated (for mature or adult) video games, like "Grand Theft Auto."

"When you start throwing my (employees) in jail for selling a video game to somebody, it's ridiculous," Dustin Hansen, store director of the Graywhale CD Exchange, recently told the Morning News. The Graywhale already restricts sales of mature-rated video games and CDs with explicit lyrics to youths, he said.

Another morals bill is Rep. Brad Daw's HCR3. The resolution asks Congress to pass laws that would help limit access to Internet pornography by minors and employees.

Daw's bill says that employees viewing porn on the Internet while at work costs Utah businesses "significant numbers of work hours." It can also strain employers' computer capacity and "leads to potentially hostile work environment for men and women."

Daw, R-Orem, says he has no "hard data" about the lost work hours due to porn viewing, but he has "considerable anecdotal" evidence that for small and mid-sized firms porn viewing "is pretty prevalent."

Large firms who employ sophisticated IT screening programs and well-educated computer experts can deal with the problem, says Daw. But in many small firms "the IT guy is someone who is really doing another job most of the time." Those firms have neither the expertise nor the IT budgets to properly filter out pornography sites through the company's computers.

Daw, who is a computer engineer, said he and other executives of a small firm were recently shocked when they installed filtering programs and discovered all of the porn sites employees were visiting during the work day.

Congress can do one relatively simple thing that could really help, says Daw. "Put all pornography sites into their own domain — so their site would be something like XXX.porn."

The federal government has the authority and ability to create new Internet domain sites, and simple technology can block whole domains, he said.

"I don't see any opposition to this resolution. Blocking these sites for kids and employees would be a good thing."

Other so-called moral bills may include:

• An effort by Rep. Paul Ray, R-Clearfield, to pass a law that would immediately restrict abortions in Utah should the U.S. Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortions in the United States.

• A bill by Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, that would further restrict sex-oriented businesses and escort services.

• And several other measures aimed at further restricting Internet access to adult sites by minors.

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E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com