Those concerns may have added salience in Utah, a state that is home to the conservative Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and is also a leading consumer of Internet pornography, according to a 2009 Harvard study.

Erick Janssen, a researcher at The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and a professor of neuroscience at the University of Leuven in Belgium, said the concerns about pornography expressed in the Utah measures “have always been there.”

“If porn was really that bad, and if you’d look at the number of people viewing it, there would be rapes at every street corner,” he said in an email. He added that debates over the issue “tend to rely more on attitudes than science.”

Many of the studies used to support claims about the harmful effects of pornography were done in the 1980s, when it was not as widespread, according to Ana J. Bridges, a professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas. She said the studies should be viewed with a degree of skepticism because they gauged correlation, not causation. More recent studies have not been conclusive.

“A lot of the claims in the Utah bill, especially those that center around the notion of addiction like a drug or around erectile dysfunction or brain stuff — the research is entirely too nascent to be able to make those claims at this point,” she said. “At this point the science is a question mark.”

The nonbinding senate resolution said one of the dangers of pornography was that it often served as a stand-in for young people’s sex education. Dr. Bridges argued that claim highlighted a larger problem: a lack of comprehensive sex education in Utah public schools, where abstinence-only is the only approved curriculum.

“You have a void, you refuse to fill that void with proper sex education and then you provide hours and hours of screen time,” she said, referring to online pornography. “So the cocktail is one that might actually be a public health crisis, but it is one of our own making in many ways.”