An occasional series of short opinions on current matters at the Utah State Legislature.

Abortion: Knowing when to fold

Discretion is the better part of valor on the battlefield and in politics.

The House voted 62-12 Monday to amend House Bill 235 to heavily restrict abortions only if the landmark Roe v. Wade case is struck down or significantly amended by the Supreme Court. In its original form, the bill would have banned abortions in Utah except in cases where a woman's life or health were at risk or if a woman became pregnant because of rape or incest, and then only if she reported the crime to police.

Rep. Paul Ray, R-Clearfield, had hoped his bill would trigger the Supreme Court showdown that would have overturned the 1973 Roe decision. However, that lawsuit would have cost the state as much as $4 million with no certainty of success. The Legislature's own attorneys warned that the measure was constitutionally suspect.

A recent poll conducted by the Deseret Morning News showed that most Utahns were opposed to spending money defending the bill. Gambling millions of taxpayer dollars on such a high-risk lawsuit is a bad idea. As Rep. Kay McIff, R-Richfield, pointed out, U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts has a record of following established law. Barring the discovery of some legal flaw in Roe that has been overlooked by some of the nations' greatest legal minds for the past 34 years, Utah's suit itself would be abortive, doomed from conception.

Clearing books of bad law

The only thing left to get rid of Utah's antiquated criminal libel laws is the stroke of Gov. Huntsman's pen. The House of Representatives voted 70-0 Monday, with five not present, to approve Senate Bill 86, repealing the state's criminal libel and slander laws.

The Utah Supreme Court declared the laws unconstitutional five years ago, but they have remained on the books ever since. Such laws may have seemed necessary in the days when disputes were settled by dueling pistols, but today they can be used to bring the power of the state against someone who says impolitic things, as happened to a Milford High School student when he created a Web site criticizing his classmates and teachers.

In addition to criminalizing public statements, the law made it a crime to question a woman's virtue.

The bill does not make it legal to make false, derogatory statements about a person. It simply sends such matters to civil courts where they belong.

High-tech meeting notices

Rep. John Dougall of Highland felt himself unfairly lumped together with Sen. Dennis Stowell of Parowan last week. Stowell's ill-advised SB 67 would take away public notices from newspapers and give them exclusively to government-run Web sites.

Dougall says his intent with HB 222 was simply to take advantage of technology to provide notices of public meetings.

We think he's got a good idea, but it needs some final polishing.

The bill, now in its third revision, is getting close to being presentable. Dougall has added some things to prevent eroding the public's right to be informed about upcoming government meetings. The bill now calls for the creation of a state public notice Web site that would act as a single warehouse for the meeting notices of all public bodies that are required under the state's Open and Public Meetings Act.

To address the concern that the government could monkey with digital information after the fact to justify illegal meetings, Dougal has added a provision under which anyone in the state -- including a newspaper -- could become a subscriber to the information on the site. Meeting notices would be sent automatically via e-mail to each subscriber.

This satisfies the need to create a duplicate of a meeting announcement and put it in the hands of a disinterested party -- the same way as notices now sent by fax machine. With duplicates sent to subscribers, any subsequent unauthorized alterations could be tracked.

The bill still has two fatal flaws, but they're easily fixed. For one thing, Dougall needs to drop the provision that says a public body's official decision may not be voided because of a technology failure. A successful e-mail burst should satisfy the notice requirment under the law, and all public bodies should be required to verify that it has taken place. If not, it isn't too much to ask that the meeting be rescheduled. (A few minutes of Internet down-time, by contrast, is not significant.)

Also spoiling the bill is a missing provision to regulate the timing of e-mail bursts. Public notices should not be allowed to gather mold on the Web site for any significant amount of time before being conveyed to subscribers. We think something like three hours should be the outer limit for e-mails.

Other than these flaws, the concept is good. Dougall deserves credit for using technology to encourage more people to participate in government.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A5.