Adding to charges by MassResistance and others that Mitt Romney “bungled” gay marriage when he was governor of Massachusetts, the candidate is now getting grief about his business career. Romney, in his effort to secure support from social conservatives, has cited pornography as among the things he stands against, but some religious-right activists are questioning his anti-porn credentials.
“Pornography and violence poison our music and movies and TV and video games,” Romney told the graduating class of Pat Robertson’s Regent University last May, discussing the deadly violence at Virginia Tech a few weeks earlier. “The Virginia Tech shooter, like the Columbine shooters before him, had drunk from this cesspool.”
But Ohio’s right-wing stalwart Phil Burress is pointing to Romney’s career on the board of Marriott hotels, where some travelers reportedly watch porn. “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.”
“They have to assume some responsibility. It’s their hotels, it’s their television sets,” adds Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. Perkins says, “[T]here’s some expectation that if an issue is important to you and you portray that issue as being important now, that when you had an opportunity to address it at a very practical level that you would have taken steps to do it.”
“And we’re talking about hardcore, X-rated pornography made available by the Marriott Corporation,” echoes Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association of Michigan. “If the board of directors of Marriott is not responsible for their sale of hardcore, X-rated pornography — tens of millions of dollars’ worth a year — then who is responsible?”
