A new law in Winona County, Minnesota says county workers can’t stay at hotels offering adult movies.
According to ABC News,”Winona County, Minnesota, has declared war on hotel room pornography, prohibiting any of its employees from staying at hotels that offer adult movies.
“The Winona County Commissioners just approved a new “clean hotel” policy that forbids employees from staying at such properties. The commissioners said pornography leads to sexual and domestic violence and that they hope to pressure hotels to drop these services.
“The county commissioners believe Winona is the first county in the country to pass such a regulation.”
ABC reports that the county is doing it to send a message and they hope it is “one small step in getting the conversation started.”
Family Leader www.familyleader.net is working with a number of groups nationwide to reduce the availability of porn, particularly in hotel rooms. Phil Burress, who leads our companion organization, Citizens for Community Values, has surveyed the 45,000 hotels nationwide and found that at least 25,000 did not carry porn. The website www.Cleanhotels.com lists those safe hotels.
Among them are Omni Hotels www.omnihotels.com who removed porn from their hotel rooms in 1999 based on the owner’s desire not to derive revenue from “this type of offering.” They lost money because of the decision, according to ABC News, but they didn’t track it.
Another is Best Western https://www.bestwestern.com/ whose 2200 rooms in the U.S. are porn free, and though many of them are independently owned, this was a stipulation in signing the licensure agreement.
Ritz Carlton https://www.ritzcarlton.com/en/Default.htm owned by Marriott doesn’t offer pornography in any of its U.S. hotels.
However, Phil Burress, said that many of the major hotels that have the greatest number of rooms across the nation, do offer adult pay-per-view programs including Marriott Hotels and Hilton.
In 2008, Family Leader was part of a coalition of 47 groups that met with Marriott to try to persuade the hotel chain to stop offering adult movies. In response, Marriott did not remove films, but added two pop-up warnings on TV screens, stating the material is adult-oriented and only those who are at least 18 years old can view it.
ABC reported that Jeff Flaherty, Marriott spokesman said, “Changing technology and how guests access entertainment has reduced the revenue hotels and their owners derive from in-room movies, including adult content” and that Marriott is working on “a new Internet-based video-on-demand which will “provide guests greater choice and control over what they watch” and “there won’t be a menu category directly offering adult videos in the new Internet-based system.”
Phil Burress and his coalition remain unsatisfied with this solution and seek to find a way to end adult-entertainment availability in these major, national hotel chains.
Read entire ABC News article. https://abcnews.go.com/Travel/hotel-porn-ban-county-votes-hotels-adult-movies/story?id=11587257
