What do most people think of when they reserve a room at a hotel? Pillow mints, complimentary breakfast – a brand new set of towels and toiletries? No sir, most people think about sex, and not the sort of sex you have with other people. That’s right; we’re talking porn – hardcore pay-per-view porn. LodgeNet, just one of the many pay-to-play streaming porno providers, took in $260 million dollars in 2009 alone. On second thought, you may want to leave the towels where they lay (hastily and shamefully balled up between the waste basket and bathtub). According to Adult Video News, 55 percent of all films purchased by hotel patrons are of the skin flick variety. Well two of America’s leading religious luminaries have had enough. Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, dean of Zeytuna College, America’s only Islamic seminary, and Robert P. George, professor at Princeton University and founder of the rightwing religious advocacy group the National Organization for Marriage, have decided to bury their respective hatchets (and not in one another’s skulls) to team up against hotel porn. After 1,500 years of the Crusades, the conquest and re-conquest of Spain, 9/11 and a thousand other conflicts big and small – we have finally reached a consensus. We’ve finally found something to agree on. Of all the issues I thought might be the one to do it, of all the issues that could have brought the world’s two largest faith communities together, I would never have bet on hotel porn. World hunger I can see, international poverty and deprivation, maybe – hotel porn, no. Needless to say, I approached their missive with a certain amount of trepidation. “We beg you to consider the young woman who is depicted as a sexual object in these movies, as nothing but a bundle of raw animal appetites whose sex organs are displayed to the voyeurs of the world and whose body is used in loveless and utterly depersonalized sex acts,” they write. The bulk of their argument is not theological, nor is it denominational. Neither quotes the Qur’an or the Bible – rather they make their appeal on “the basis of a commitment that should be shared by all people of reason and goodwill: a commitment to human dignity and the common good.” To Yusuf and George, this is an argument which goes beyond porn in hotel rooms. It’s an issue of creating “a society in which young people are encouraged to respect others and themselves-treating no one as an impersonal object or thing.” It’s an issue of creating a culture which edifies human dignity, an issue of honoring and loving people for their intrinsic human value. I was impressed, I teared up a little bit – and apparently the people at Marriot did too. A number of large hotel chains have already begun, or recently agreed to begin, phasing porn out of their in-room viewing menus, which has another American luminary pretty pissed off. Ron Jeremy, high priest of pornography, is hitting back on the grounds that masturbation is free speech. “If a guy has a hard day at work or is at a convention and wants to sit down in his hotel room and puts on an adult film and plays spank the monkey, why can’t he do that?” Jeremy told reporters in response to the George-Yusuf campaign. Though the two religious leaders disagree, they haven’t made a legal issue out of hotel porn (and they probably couldn’t). They recognize people have the right to make their own choices and aren’t attempting to force anyone into anything. Rather they are hoping these large companies will electively put people over profits and make a statement against pornography on their own.
Nicholas Pierce is a 22-year old history senior from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_nabdulpierc. 
 
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