Just about every piece of legislation introduced at the state Capitol these days by Republicans is meant to send a message to MAGA constituents and to accomplish … nothing.

Apparently, GOP taxpayers are fine with this, perhaps because GOP lawmakers have become pretty good at spending time and taxpayer money putting on public performances over bills that sound like something, but aren’t.

For instance, Senate Bill 1007.

The Arizona Republic’s Ray Stern reported on a committee discussion about this proposal, which would make it a Class 5 felony for public school professionals to refer or use sexually explicit material.

Doing such a thing is already against the law, but carries no criminal punishment. This bill could land a public school offender in prison.

Republicans reject law applying to private schools

But not someone who is working in a private school. Should the bill become law it would not apply to private schools.

Senate Democratic Leader Mitzi Epstein attempted to add an amendment to the bill to include all schools, public and private. Republicans rejected it.

She said, “It sounds to me that voting against this amendment means you want to protect the owners of private schools. If a teacher is going to be subject to a felony under the vague terms spelled out in the underlying statute, then we need to apply this risk across the board to private schools as well.”

To most people’s thinking, this is not unreasonable. As in, the law should apply to everyone.

Why is the law applying to everyone so wrong?

GOP members actually appeared to be angered by this suggestion.

Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman, the bill’s sponsor, said, “This might be one of the loonier amendments I’ve ever seen, given that apparently Sen. Epstein thinks that Christian schools are referring students to sexually explicit material. The idea that private Christian schools are showing these completely inappropriate and disgusting images to children is completely laughable.”

It is unclear what disgusting images Hoffman is referring to, but anyone who keeps up with the news is aware that no faith is without members who exhibit bad, even criminal, behavior.

Besides, the GOP’s budget-busting expansion of Empowerment Scholarship Accounts now allows all students, in any private school, to use taxpayer money for tuition.

Still, Republican Sen. Sonny Borrelli said, “Private schools are not showing these sexually explicit materials. It’s all doing it in public schools.”

Bill appears to send a creepy unintended message

I’m sure that spewing amorphous accusations like that plays well with MAGA constituents, but I’d guess that any public school student with rudimentary critical thinking skills could explain to Borrelli and Hoffman how their legislation seems to send a creepy unintended message.

One simply has to apply a bit of inverse logic. It works sort of like this:

If Arizona were to pass a law saying it is only a crime for public schools to use or show explicit material the Legislature would, in essence, be saying it is okay for private schools to do so.

I’m pretty sure that is NOT the message they’d like to send.

And if the lawmakers behind SB 1007 have trouble grasping that, I’d suggest they ask a public school student to explain it to them.

I’m sure there are many who could do so.

Explicitly.

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Republicans are seemingly OK with explicit material in private schools