TAMPA, Florida (Reuters) - The Republican Party is calling for a crackdown on pornography in a move that could pit social conservatives against hotel operators, television providers and other businesses that profit from the sale of sexually explicit material.
Martin Ent Inc wrote: TAMPA, Florida (Reuters) - The Republican Party is calling for a crackdown on pornography in a move that could pit social conservatives against hotel operators, television providers and other businesses that profit from the sale of sexually explicit material.
Martin Ent Inc wrote: Well as we all know Mitt is supposedly a moderate conservative.
And we need PROOF, of the above allegations.
Daniel Weiss, media analyst for James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family,” added to the rancor: “If [Romney] made money off pornography in the past, is he going to turn a blind eye to it if he’s president? Because as chief executive of the nation, it’s his responsibility to make sure our nation’s obscenity laws are efficiently and vigorously enforced.”
“Marriott is a major pornographer,” intoned Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values (CCV), an Ohio-based anti-pornography group. “And even though he may have fought it, everyone on that board is a hypocrite for presenting themselves as family values when their hotels offer 70 different types of hardcore pornography.”
As early as 2000, Burress started challenging Marriott over offering in-room TV porn. In 2006, he pulled together a coalition of Christian conservatives to wage his campaign; the coalition included Focus on the Family, the American Family Association of Michigan and the CCV. It took out a full-page ad in USA Today demanding the Department of Justice crack down on hotel porn, specifically targeting the Marriott and Hilton chains. No action was taken.
Also in 2000, the Michigan-based American Decency Association attacked Marriott over the distribution of in-room porn. J.W. “Bill” Marriott Jr., the son of Marriott’s founder, defended porn distribution, claiming that it was offered as a separable TV offering. “The in-room entertainment operators who provide our systems rely upon a certain volume of movie types in order to be economically viable.” He argued that “f we were to eliminate the ‘R’ and non-rated offerings, the systems would not be economic.”
This rationalization is obviously self-serving. In 2008, neither the The Omni Hotels nor the Ritz-Carlton offered in-room porn. Nevertheless, a buck is a buck and, in addition to Marriott, many leading corporations were then intimately involved in the hotel porn business, including Hilton, AT&T, Time Warner, General Motors, EchoStar, Liberty Media and Murdoch’s News Corporation.
After RMoney stepped down from the board of Marriot, they then chose to quit pushing porn.
THE HOTEL chain Marriott recently announced that it would cease selling "adult content"—ie, pornography—in its newer hotels. Anyone who knows a bit about the hotel business might find this move a bit confusing. After all, porn is still a moneymaker for chains like Marriott, which by some estimates was earning $175 per room, per year in smut peddling alone.
But there does seem to be a method to Marriott's madness. Politico's Ben Smith explains that Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and a presumptive candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, recently left the Marriott board. The chain's owners are "longtime Romney supporters", Mr Smith notes. And social conservatives, apparently, hit Mr Romney hard on the porn "issue" during the ex-governor's 2008 campaign for the GOP nomination. (One critic called Mr Romney a "major pornographer.") So in some sense, Mr Smith argues, Marriott appears to be doing Mr Romney a "costly favor."