Lawrence O'Donnell Hails Hugh Hefner as Prophet of GOP 'War on Sex'

April 24th, 2012 11:13 PM

You know you’re watching a left-wing network when an anchor honors as a professor and historian one Hugh Hefner, better known as a lecherous 86-year-old pornography mogul with girlfriends that are 60 years younger.

On Monday night’s “Last Word,” Lawrence O’Donnell proclaimed, “One of the field generals of the American sexual revolution of the 1960s has had enough of the Republican Party's war on sex.” To the left, one may not express a personal distaste for contraceptive culture or question the apparent right to government-provided contraceptives without being accused of despising sex.

O’Donnell continued: 

In an editorial entitled "The War Against Sex" in the new issue of Playboy, Hugh Hefner says, "while wooing the conservative vote, these candidates revealed the ways a GOP-led government would decide with whom we can have sex and for what reasons, single or married, straight or gay."

Can MSNBC or its favorite pornographers achieve a higher level of hyperbolic nonsense? Rick Santorum never ran for president so he could decide which girl who could be his grandchild  Hugh Hefner will pay for sex. It’s like none of these liberals realize the primaries are over.
But to O’Donnell, “Hefner teaches his younger readers that their sexual privacy was a recently earned right” -- as if they read the articles.

Yes, to O’Donnell, Hefner offers the “perfectly articulated” viewpoint. He turned to Ana Marie Cox, now blogging for the left-wing U.K. rag The Guardian. She’s pushing 40, so to Hefner, she’s far too old to date:

O’DONNELL: Ana Marie, this notion that we have a war on sex, I think, has been finally, perfectly articulated by Hugh Hefner, who else, who has shown very clearly that the Republicans are really saying things that we really haven’t heard advanced seriously since the 1960s, when it became the losing argument as the sexual revolution overtook the crazy laws that we had in this country, banning even the discussion of contraception publicly.

ANA MARIE COX: That's right. And I think he’s correct in saying that this is probably the last gasp of some desperate people, really trying to hold on to that retrograde notion about sex. I also really want to add that, you know, it's titillating to talk about this as the war against sex, and to talk about the bedroom, and to talk about what kind of sexual rights allowed, but this is really about civil rights and human rights and about gender equality.

When we talk about contraception, yes that has to do with sex, but that has to do with women's economic power in the workplace as well. This is not something which we can just be titillated by, which is what I think Rick Santorum might want. This is something that has to do with people's everyday lives. It has to do with why I can sit here and talk to you right now.

Apparently, Rick Santorum not only wants to ban contraception, he wants to ban female bloggers from appearing on television! As for the sexual revolution overtaking "crazy laws," the new crazy law is ObamaCare requiring insurance companies to buy everyone's contraceptive devices, even if the employer is Roman Catholic and contraception (or sterilizations or abortifacient drugs) runs contrary to their religious beliefs.

It would be hyperbolic to accuse Obama and MSNBC of waging "War on Catholics" or even "War on God," but it would match O'Donnell's level of rhetorical excess. The sheer imagination required to think the Republican primaries were a competition to see who could be harsher in deciding who Lawrence O'Donnell could have sex with is mind-boggling.