Next trip, we’re staying at a Marriott

Puritan busybody groups (you know the type) blast Mitt Romney for not doing more - or doing anything, actually - to kill Marriott’s porn movie trade while he served on the hotel chain’s board of directors.

Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney, who rails against the “cesspool” of pornography, is being criticized by social conservatives who argue that he should have tried to halt hardcore hotel movie offerings during his near-decade on the Marriott board.

Two anti-pornography crusaders, as well as two conservative activists of the type Romney is courting, say the distribution of such graphic adult movies runs counter to the family image cultivated by Romney, the Marriotts and their shared Mormon faith.

“Marriott is a major pornographer. 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,” said Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values, an anti-pornography group based on Ohio.

Far from having “fought” porn at Marriott, it’s more likely that the famously detail-oriented Romney studiously avoided the subject. High moral talk is all well and good, but it’s revenue that’s holy.

During a recent Associated Press interview, Romney said he did not recall pornography coming up for discussion while he was on the Marriott board from 1992 to 2001. Despite being chairman of the board’s audit committee, he also said he was unaware of how much revenue pornography may have generated for the hotel chain. [...]

“It certainly would have been wrong to impose his own personal beliefs if they were contrary to the financial interests of the company,” Marriott spokesman Roger Conner said of Romney.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Romney campaign spins this with ill-tempered conservative watchdogs. In the meantime, I’m planning my next roadtrip.

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