From the March 2025 edition of The Prairie Progressive, Iowa’s oldest progressive newsletter. The PP is  funded entirely by reader subscription, available in hard copy for $15/yr.  Send check to PP, Box 1945, Iowa City 52244. Click here for archived issues.

Don’t let your children read this

by Marty Ryan

A few Iowa legislators have discovered what film producers, TV directors, and best-selling authors have found: sex sells! House File 43 creates a crime when “the covered genitals of a male person that are in a discernibly turgid state” are part of an unsolicited photo. You have to wonder if you could get arrested for sending someone a YouTube video of a Led  Zepplin concert (Robert Plant always maintained a turgid appearance on stage). And HF 17 and SF 104 permits the defendant to be surgically castrated for “certain sex crimes.” Ouch!

Senate File 208 would carve into law that a “sexual attraction to minors is not a protected class for purposes of the Iowa Civil Rights Act.” Is this a major issue for Iowans?

From sex, the legislature reaches right into your neighborhood library. SF 235 and HF 274  repeal a provision in the obscenity statute that gives an exception to libraries. But to go a step further, SF 238 and HF 284 would cut off state assistance to libraries under the Enrich Iowa Program to libraries that pay dues to the American Library Association.

If the legislature cannot control what you read in the libraries, it will slither into the schools and decide what is best for students, such as HF 165 and Senate Study Bill 1030, requiring “students to pass the United States citizenship and immigration services
naturalization civics test as a condition of high school graduation and high school equivalency diplomas.” It sounds a bit like the loyalty oaths of the 1950s. And public schools, but for some reason not private schools, HF 166 requires a “display of the
national motto (In God we trust) and the state motto, and to start each day of classroom instruction with silent time.” And HF 138 provides that schools may offer an elective
social study course emphasizing religious scripture. Under the heading “education,” HSB 158 prohibits minors to view drag shows.

For schools struggling to understand the requirements of the previous paragraph, HF 334 allows schools to hire a chaplain – no qualifications necessary. And SF 280 allows a student to receive credits for religious instruction.

Have you heard that the House has created a new committee? The Committee on Higher Education. The intent must be to have Iowa adolescents and tenured professors leave Iowa sooner than they have in the past. A requirement (HSB 156) to post on a college’s website a syllabus that includes the professor’s name, a description of each major course, required or recommended reading material, a description of the subject matter or each lecture or discussion, and any changes must be made as soon as practical. Also, under HF 295, an accrediting agency cannot be a government agency and allows the attorney general of Iowa to take legal action on behalf of the regents institution if it receives an adverse action from the accrediting agency.

SF 236 relates to “certain sincerely held religious or moral beliefs of child foster care providers and prospective adoptive parents.” HF 280 prohibits the governor from closing or regulating a place of worship during times of an emergency proclamation.

The Cedar Rapids Gazette and the Des Moines Register published expansive articles relating to the discussion of a subcommittee meeting (HF 191) that regulates cloud seeding. Contrails are being mistaken for chemtrails, and it seems as though contrails are
poisoning residents of Iowa as jets fly over the state. “Atmospheric experts and government agencies say there is no basis for the chemtrail conspiracy theory.”

Shining further into that dark space is a bill (HSB 144) that would create a license plate with the Gadsden flag; two bills (HSB 166 & HSB 168) allowing judicial officers, including
Supreme Court justices, to legally carry a gun; a bill (HF 25) creating the crime of wearing a mask in the commission of a criminal offense (speeding?); a bill (HF 24) including sharks as dangerous animals. HF 46 relates to law enforcement training to prevent motorcyclist profiling, and HF 353 states that a person may not run in a primary unless the person has been member of a political party for at least a year.

One of the first bills introduced during the 2025 Iowa General Assembly was House File 53, a bill that would make U.S. Highway 75 in Northwest Iowa the “President Donald J. Trump Highway.” Ironically, Highway 75 runs across the border at Emerson, Manitoba,
Canada, and keeps right on going into Winnipeg.

There’s more, too much more. Some of these bills will not make it to enactment.  Unfortunately, several of them will. Please stay in touch with your legislators. Keep in mind that all of this is designed to give you the “Freedom to Flourish.”

—Marty Ryan doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry in Iowa’s capital city.