Hefner writes, 'If these zealots have their way, our hard-won sexual liberation ... lie in peril.' Hugh Hefner: GOP 'war against sex'

Although it’s his magazine, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner doesn’t frequently take to its pages to wax poetic about one thing or another. In the May issue, however, Hefner pens a rare, full-page editorial on an unsurprising topic: Sex.

This time, it’s political, however. In “The War Against Sex,” Hefner blasts “repressed conservatives” who he says are “pounding on America’s bedroom door.”


“For months I have watched the rhetoric building,” writes Hefner. “Last October, in an interview with an evangelical blogger, Rick Santorum promised to defund birth control on the grounds that contraception is ‘a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.’ … Ron Paul was no better, believing that the birth control pill did not cause immorality but that immorality creates the problem of wanting to use the pill. Mitt Romney vowed to see a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and to overturn Roe v. Wade.”

Hefner continues to site a history of efforts against sexual liberty and some of his successful attempts to defeat them.

Then: “All these years later I hear echoes of this same ignorance espoused by a new crop of self-appointed arbiters who are determined to oversee our morality. I heard it when Santorum backer Foster Friess said, ‘Back in my days, [women] used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives,’ implying that if women held an aspirin between their legs, they wouldn’t open them. I heard it when I learned about proposed anit-abortion legislation in Kansas that would protect doctors who conceal vital medical information from pregnant women. And I heard it when Rush Limbaugh called a Georgetown University law student a ‘slut’ and a ‘prostitute’ after she testified on Capitol Hill about allowing employers to avoid providing contraception for religious reasons. … Fifty years of sexual freedom vanished in a sound bite.”

Hefner concludes that, “If these zealots have their way, our hard-won sexual liberation — women’s rights, reproductive rights and rights to privacy — lie in peril. We won’t let that happen. … Welcome to the new sexual revolution.”

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