Attorneys across Utah received an unexpected email from the State Bar on Monday, March 5: a photograph of a topless young woman’s boobs.
The photograph came as an attachment to an email with the benign subject line: “2018 Spring Convention Walk-Ins Welcome! Learn How!”
“We are horrified,” John Baldwin, the bar association’s executive director, told local news station Fox 13 in Salt Lake City. “We are investigating to discover how this occurred. Our goal is to find out what happened and ensure it never happens again.”
Across the state, lawyers reacted with amusement.
The Utah State Bar, which certifies all attorneys in the state, also tweeted out an apology, claiming it was “investigating the matter”:
Porn obsession
Ironically, activists from the state of Utah have long been key drivers of anti-porn crusades in the United States. Despite the fact that, for many years, Utah has had one of the highest rates of porn consumption anywhere, it has declared porn a public health crisis. This is because Utah is the home of the Mormon church
Most Utah state legislators and judges are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and some of the most frequently-cited “data” in the anti-porn movement are nothing more than “pseudoscience” from Donald Hilton, a Mormon neurosurgeon.
Matt Page, communications director for the Bar, told Deseret News that the organization is looking into how the image got out — and if it was done accidentally or on purpose.
“We are looking into both of those scenarios,” Page told the newspaper. “At this point, we’re not sure which one of those occurred.”
Either way, it seems clear that many members of the Utah bar weren’t exactly upset: “I can’t circulate this fast enough. Hysterical,” one attorney texted to Fox13.
Maybe Utah does have a porn problem after all. . . .
