There are no pictures hanging on the bureaucrat-brown walls of Paula Houston's office. No knickknacks on the desk, no pithy expressions taped to her computer, no books on the shelves.
There's not even the telltale clutter of papers to suggest she's an attorney with weighty matters to tend to, certainly more important than talking to yet another news reporter. She's already talked to the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Time Magazine, the National Law Journal and Penthouse.com.
Only weeks into her new job, Houston — Utah's official "porn czar" — has had time to deal with little else but media interviews and answering letters, calls and e-mails from the curious, the amused and the irate.
"I knew going into the job it would be controversial," the former West Valley prosecutor said. "It did surprise me when the attacks turned personal."
"But life goes on," she added, refusing to comment on negative news reports that included speculations about her own sexuality.
Officially, Houston, 41, is the state obscenity and pornography complaints ombudsman, a position within the Attorney General's Office that was created by the 2000 Legislature to help local communities better understand and strengthen their pornography laws and ordinances and otherwise "advise local governments about strategies to restrict, suppress or eliminate obscenity and pornography in their communities."
She will not prosecute pornography cases, but she could if requested to by Attorney General Mark Shurtleff.
The Legislature this past week approved funding for Houston's position for another fiscal year, meaning Houston will be guaranteed employment through the end of June 2002. That's enough time, she said, to get her program up and running, but it won't be enough to fix everything wrong with pornography in Utah.
Although she's a country girl raised on a cattle ranch in northwestern Montana, Houston does not come to the job as a wide-eyed innocent. She spent 14 years prosecuting a host of big-city misdemeanors: DUIs, traffic cases, assaults, thefts, vice cases. One of her first prosecutions was a pornography case, she said, recalling how undercover police had raided a local video store renting hard-core pornographic videos.
"We didn't have a lot of pornography cases in West Valley, maybe five in 15 years," she said. "But we had a lot of cases where pornography was involved."
She remembers domestic violence cases where husbands became increasingly violent after becoming addicted to pornography, and sex assault cases where the perpetrators were heavy users of pornography. "Every single child-sexual-assault case I worked on, pornography was involved," she said.
Some of it was child pornography. "You see something like that and it rips your heart out," she said. "I just don't understand people who enjoy child pornography."
Houston said she has been personally involved in police sting operations on pornographers, she watched countless hours of videotape and she drafted the warrants and complaints charging pornographers with crimes. Like all prosecutors, she was careful to avoid writing her personal feelings about what she saw.
"My personal feelings do not go down on paper," she said.
So how does she feel about pornography? Houston first balked at the question but then detailed her views on how pornography is degrading to everyone associated with it. Those addicted to pornography, she said, see other people as nothing more than objects without feelings or emotions. And it is much easier to commit crimes against objects than people.
Houston found herself desensitized after watching hours and hours of pornographic videos; it happens to every prosecutor and police officer involved with pornography cases. "After 10 hours, you become numb," she said.
It was not something Houston expected to be doing when she left Montana in 1982 to attend Brigham Young University. At the time, she thought she wanted to be a police officer. During college she worked for the Utah County Jail and as a security officer at a Provo hospital and for BYU's police chief.
But she decided she wanted something more. She wanted to be a prosecutor.
In 1986, at the beginning of her third year at BYU's law school, she went to work for West Valley City. When she left the city's employment two weeks ago, she was a senior attorney in charge of legal advice to the police department, as well as of a victims' advocacy program she started in the early 1990s.
Her approach to her new job as state porn czar — she has resigned herself that no better monicker is about to come along — sounds a lot like advice from the self-help books she likes to read.
"My job is to help people understand they need to take a stand and do something about it as citizens," she said.
In her short tenure on the job, she has met with citizen activists who have pressured grocery stores into removing or covering magazines they found offensive. Citizen groups even have persuaded businesses to stop carrying products.
As much as anything, Houston says, her job will be to persuade citizens that "power is in the individual, not in government. Government can only do a little bit, and that's the way it should be," she said.
"It is important for people to stand up and say they don't like something and are offended," she said. "They will find they aren't alone when they start speaking out."
Houston said she will be working with local governments to implement tougher laws, but she will also be advising them on what they cannot do that would impinge on constitutionally protected freedoms.
"The ultimate would be to do something about the Internet issue," she said. "It's one of our biggest problems."
Internet pornography, she says, is perhaps the most insidious form of pornography because "people who would never have gone out looking for it can get it in their own homes, often without their wives knowing or their parents knowing. They get addicted."
Houston knows she will get some criticism from civil libertarians over her assertions that what people view in the privacy of their own homes should be regulated.
"Mostly I am concerned about the kids," she said. "If the parents can get into (pornographic Web sites), so can the kids. And they are so impressionable as children. It's why we have laws to give children time to develop and learn what their own mind is before they start seeing stuff like that."
Lest you think she might be tilting at Internet windmills, Houston offers a reminder: The U.S. Justice Department has successfully prosecuted satellite television companies for allowing movies into the state that are not acceptable under Utah law. And that involved the very same question of a freedom to view something in the privacy of your own home.
Houston's own home — she won't disclose where she lives, only that she lives with two dogs — is a clutter of boxes and files. She says she is not about to move her things until Shurtleff, her boss, decides exactly where her permanent office will be. And until the Legislature approved money for her position through 2002, it might not have done any good to unpack anyway (the position was originally funded for only six months).
For now, Houston says she will focus her energies on getting to know citizen activists, city leaders and prosecutors from around the state.
And the "small-town country girl," as she describes herself, will keep on granting media interviews.
E-mail: spang@desnews.com