Utah kids could begin getting hit up to play blackjack or try their luck on Las Vegas' loosest slot machines under legislation being sponsored by a conservative Utah County lawmaker.

Sen. Mark Madsen, R-Eagle Mountain, is sponsoring SB248 to exempt casino gambling from the state's do-not-contact registry, designed to protect children from solicitations for pornography, alcohol, smoking and other adult-oriented business.

He told a committee this week the casino carve-out was brought to him by the Attorney General's Office, which won a lawsuit in October brought by the pornography industry challenging the registry but feared it couldn't withstand a suit by the gambling industry.

That is not Attorney General Mark Shurtleff's recollection.

"We didn't come up with this," Shurtleff said. "The casino folks came to [Madsen] initially and asked him to run the bill and then came to us next." A version of the bill had already been drafted, Shurtleff said, and the state attorneys worked with Madsen, who is also an attorney, to craft a bill that would preserve the registry and that the Attorney General's Office was comfortable with.

If they didn't get the exemption, Shurtleff said, the casinos threatened to sue the state.

Under Utah's existing child protection registry, adult-oriented companies that want to blast advertise to e-mail addresses in Utah must first pay a contractor called Unspam Technologies Inc. to "scrub" the list of names to remove any of the 350,000 children's e-mail addresses that parents have registered with the state.

Madsen said the registry was intended to focus on alcohol, tobacco and pornography, but was never meant to prohibit gambling solicitations.

"If there was any kind of confidence from the attorney general's office they could win this, I wouldn't be doing this," Madsen said.

Dave Nicponski, a lobbyist for the Nevada Resort Association which is pushing the bill, said casinos don't contact children and wouldn't because they can't legally gamble.

Moreover, the state doesn't have the authority to regulate a Nevada-based business and the casinos will not comply. If the law isn't changed, the industry will sue and it could bring down the entire registry in "an overzealous attempt to legislate morality."

"It's inappropriate to lump the gaming industry with the smut peddlers. There's just no comparison and it's offensive to us," he said.

The context of the fight, Shurtleff said, is much larger than just Utah. There is an effort in Congress to try to make the Utah registry a model for the rest of the nation, and the attorney general predicts it will succeed.

If casinos can't make the case for a carve-out in that legislation, it would be much more than the minor inconvenience that is the Utah legislation. It would mean they would have to spend millions of dollars scrubbing their e-mail lists in every state.

But Madsen's proposal has conservative groups, who traditionally back the like-minded legislator, concerned about the impacts.

"I didn't like that bill from the beginning," said Gayle Ruzicka, president of the Utah Eagle Forum. "Senator Madsen is a really, really good man who believes in that registry. He would never do anything to destroy it. That registry has to be protected at all costs."

If the state has to exempt gambling to preserve the rest of the registry, she said, it is a pill they will have to swallow, but she would rather leave it the way it is.

"I don't believe anything [the casinos] are saying. They're evil people," she said. "They'd love to addict all of us, including children."

Shurtleff said what sparked the issue is he sent letters to the casinos warning them they need to comply with Utah's child registry requirement or face penalties from the state.

Madsen's bill would specifically allow advertisements from casinos that can verify the age of the customer in a face-to-face exchange. It would not exempt online gambling.

It would also prohibit casinos from piggybacking advertisements for things like drink specials or exotic dancers in their solicitations.

SB248 received unanimous support in committee and is now awaiting action by the full Senate. Madsen is optimistic it will pass before the Legislature adjourns next week.