GOP mega donor Foster Friess resurfaced on Friday with a message for Playboy founder Hugh Hefner: “Contraception’s been very, very good to me.”
You might remember Friess from the 2012 presidential election. The multi-millionaire was the single biggest contributor to the super PAC that supported Republican Rick Santorum’s candidacy. But, he earned the most headlines for telling msnbc’s Andrea Mitchell that, in his day, women used aspirin between their knees as contraception, which earned the ire of the Playboy founder. Yeah, that guy.
At an event Friday hosted by the Christian Science Monitor in Washington, Friess told the crowd that he was “stunned” Democrats “somehow” convinced voters there was a GOP-led “war on women.”
“They tried convince that somehow Santorum was going to do this–that Republicans were against contraception,” he said, TPM reported. “Hugh Hefner said, ‘this guy Friess wants to reverse the sexual revolution.’ Well, I have four kids. They’re two years apart. And contraception’s been very, very good to me.”
Oh, he went on. He complained that no Republicans “confronted that and said this is a bald-faced demagoguery,” which to him, indicted a major “flaw” of the GOP. “A lot of the women out there, they, you know, they were, I guess—what’s the proper word I want to use—seduced—that this a war on women.”
In a May 2012 op-ed for Playboy, Hefner called out Friess and “repressed Republicans” for waging a larger war against sex.
“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,” wrote Hefner, citing Friess, anti-abortion legislation in Kansas and Rush Limbaugh calling grad student Sandra Fluke a “slut” as examples. “Fifty years of sexual freedom vanished in a sound bite,” he lamented.
Friess, an advocate for socially conservative values, said he would support Santorum again in 2016, if he decides to run.
Sarah Muller