Gore’s Unwanted Friends

August 15, 2000

The Democratic convention was soured by a minor embarrassment over the Playboy Mansion. That’s where California’s Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez was planning to hold a big fundraiser for Hispanic causes, until Al Gore decided it would be unseemly.

After all, Gore is currently trying to remake himself as a godly, un-Clinton-like candidate, to which end he has annexed the saintly Senator Joe Lieberman to his ticket. A big Democratic do at Hugh Hefner’s swinging headquarters wouldn’t exactly burnish the new image. So Gore sent the word to Sanchez: Oh no you don’t.

At first she was adamant. The event had been planned for a long time, and it promised to be lucrative. As a politician, she naturally resented Gore telling her whom she could and couldn’t hit up for money.

Gore kept the heat on, threatening to revoke her privilege of speaking to the convention. She finally buckled, still smarting, and gave up the scheduled speech anyway. Hefner and his daughter were also miffed at the snub.

Various observers have accused Gore of hypocrisy. After all, he has long accepted hefty Hefner campaign donations. Suddenly he has got religion?

Gore is certainly a hypocrite, and a transparent one. He has no convictions, merely “positions,” which he switches abruptly for political convenience. He used to vote against abortion, then became aggressively pro-abortion, denying flatly that he’d ever voted otherwise.

Eventually he was forced to admit that he’d flip-flopped. He tried to explain that he’d become persuaded of the “pro-choice” view by talking to “women,” as if women were unanimously pro-abortion. All he proved was that he’d never sincerely held either position.

So the idea that he now has earnest moral reservations about the Playboy Mansion is hard to credit. All he has is another new “position.” The irritation of Sanchez and the Hefners is understandable. They are dealing with a nakedly sanctimonious and two-faced fake.

But the aborted fundraiser and Gore’s previous acceptance of Hefner dough are secondary matters.

The real point is that the money was offered in the first place.

What is it about the Democrats that they attract pornographers like flies? Whether or not they asked for it, wanted it, or accepted it, they have earned the eager support of unsavory people. During Clinton’s impeachment hearings, Larry Flynt volunteered his services as a blackmailer, soliciting dirt on congressional Republicans to deter them from pursuing their prosecution of the perjurious president. Clinton was reportedly delighted, not ashamed, to have the vile Flynt on his side.

Flynt makes Hefner seem a paragon of taste and decency, but Flynt is Hefner’s spawn. Hefner so successfully lowered public standards with his slick porn that he prepared the way for even cruder panders, who in turn cut into Hefner’s market share. Today Hefner enjoys a rather benign and respectable image as the elder Disney of porn.

Still, Hefner and Flynt are in the same racket — what Tom Wolfe has called “one-hand mags.” But they can’t bear to be thought of as mere pornographers; they like to think of themselves as champions of some sort of public good: fighting hypocrisy, defending the First Amendment, promoting sexual freedom and, inevitably, abortion. And when they look at the Democrats, they see their kind of people. And they want to help.

So why shouldn’t we draw the appropriate conclusion: that the Democrats are indeed Hefner’s and Flynt’s kind of people? Whether or not the Democrats socialize with them as readily as Loretta Sanchez does, whether or not the Gore campaign takes their money, the fact remains that the porn merchants like them. They really like them!

And for good reason. The Democrats are the party of the sexual revolution: fostering abortion, homosexuality, sexual license generally, anti-family feminism. Even good family men like Gore and Lieberman support, as a matter of policy, practices they themselves wouldn’t indulge in, just as gentle people who would never dream of shooting anyone may support militaristic policies.

Gore’s — and Lieberman’s — attempts to distance themselves, during an election year, from some of the more flagrant manifestations of the sexual revolution shouldn’t fool anyone. If they have received the backing of the forces of perversion, it’s because they’ve courted it — and deserved it.

Joseph Sobran

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