Texas Legislature Passes Bill Criminalizing Sex Jokes on Campus

It appears the legislature has passed and the Governor has signed a bill that allows law enforcement to jail any campus employee who hears — or even hears about — a joke about sex on a college campus and doesn’t report it as a Title IX violation.

Here is the description of SB 212 from the first paragraph of the bill:

The bill would require an employee of a post secondary education institution who, in the course and scope of employment, witnesses or receives information regarding the occurrence of an incident that the employee reasonably believes constitutes sexual harassment, sexual assault, dating violence, or stalking and is alleged to have been committed by or against a person who was a student enrolled at or an employee of the institution at the time of the incident must report the incident to the institution's Title IX or deputy Title IX coordinator.

Here is an excerpt of the analysis of the bill from National Review:

Now, I obviously would agree with any non-sociopath that sexual harassment is an awful, harrowing thing that absolutely no one should have to go through — and that people who perpetuate it should be punished. The problem, though, is that the current definition places the standard for what does and does not count as “sexual harassment” solely on the interpretation of the person who claims to be experiencing it. If someone happens to make a sexual joke — even if that joke was not directed at a specific other person, and even if that joke was innocuous and tame — and that other person claims to have experienced difficulty participating in activities because of it, then the person who made that joke is automatically guilty of sexual harassment based on the other person’s feelings . . . regardless of whether or not he or she had actually done anything actually wrong.

What’s more, this essentially demands that campus employees report every single mention of sex or sexuality that they hear or even hear about, because they have no way of knowing whether or not someone who heard it is going to claim that they experienced significant emotional distress because of it — and, if someone does, they could go to jail. This is a completely unreasonable and stupid waste of time, and it will also likely result in campus officials being too bogged down with gratuitous claims to have the time and resources to focus on the actually serious ones.

The obvious question is; Did the Governor read the bill before he signed it?