"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."
In early 2011, more than a decade after the controversy first erupted, Marriott ceased offering in-room porn TV services. The Mormon Hotel chain is a major contributor to the Romney campaign.
The saga of Romney, Marriott hotels and porn has taken a peculiar twist in light of the 2012 election. As Romney moved with calculated precision to the right and become ostensibly more conservative, the Marriott chain gave up offering porn but reached out for the gay dollar, becoming "what?", more liberal.
The greatest fiction of the Romney campaign is that he presents himself as a businessman, indistinguishable for the small retail-store owner who lives or works next door. As one of the victims of his hedge-fund calculations reminds us, "All he knows is how to shovel cash from one pile to another pile." He is, first and foremost, a banker, a speculator, a white-shoe gangster, a moneylender making a buck through usury.
While on the Marriott board, Romney's support for offering porn signified his adherence of capitalism over Christian morals. It seems that for Romney, the church (Mormon, Evangelical or Jewish) was then and remains a parallel institution to the state; where one imposed moral discipline and conformity, the other functions as an apparatus of power and tax-collection serving corporate interests. Both serve the same goal, insuring the authority of the 1 percent. Watching him on the campaign stump, it seems that he still believes this in his heart-of-hearts. If he still has a heart.
David Rosen
