It goes without saying Playboy founder Hefner has been a fierce advocate of sexual liberation. Now, he’s speaking out on the recent proposals by conservatives to curtail women’s reproductive rights.
According to Politico, he railed against “repressed Republicans” that have been “pounding on America’s bedroom door” in a rare op-ed appearing in the May issue of the magazine.
“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.’” He continued, “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.”
As the Hef pointed out, he’s been down this road before many times before. “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 Santorum backer Foster Friess aspirin-between-their-knees comment, anti-abortion legislation in Kansas and Rush Limbaugh callinggrad student Sandra Fluke a “slut” as examples. “Fifty years of sexual freedom vanished in a sound bite,” he lamented.
After watching the “rhetoric building,” Hefner vowed to fight the proposed policies of these right-wing “zealots.”
Sarah Muller