ST. PETERSBURG, FL — There’s nothing new about religious zealots banging the anti-pornography drum with all the fervor they can muster — especially in election years.This year, though, the furthest right of the so-called “social conservatives,” apparently beginning to doubt their ability to exact a stranglehold on the polls in November, are taking a slightly different tack. Instead of strong-arming candidates with their alleged voting-block power, they’re taking their grievances directly to mainstream distributors of adult entertainment in an attempt to reclaim Americans’ bankrupt souls.

Marriott International, one of the largest lodging companies in the U.S. is at the top of their list of targets.

Like most other motel and hotel chains, Marriott offers XXX in-room movies on a pay-per-view basis, and each hotel relies on the income from the adult movies to add a significant sum to its bottom line. The movies are listed on special menu in the “guest services” section of the on-screen menu in every Marriott hotel room. Parents traveling with children can request that portion of the menu be made unavailable in their rooms. Hotels using LodgeNet as their pay-per-view provider can block the channels themselves using the TV’s remote control.

That’s not good enough for a coalition of conservative Christian groups that is pressuring Marriott to get rid of the adult viewing options altogether. Their reason? The coalition claims offering in-room porn to adult who want to view it indicates a lack of commitment to the welfare of children and families.

“It’s corporate greed,” Phil Burress, president of Cincinnati-based Citizens for Community Values,” told the St. Petersburg Times. “This is their ugly sister in the closet.”

Marriott executives met with two high-profile religious conservative organizations in May: the American Family Association and Focus on the Family. The hotelier avoided making promises to the groups, but said it would investigate additional options for ensuring children can’t access adult materials. One of those options, supported by the religious coalition, is to require guests to opt-in to porn access instead of allowing them to opt-out.

That’s not good enough for American Family Association leader Rev. Donald Wildmon. He said his group wants all access to porn removed from Marriott hotels by August 15th or the AFA will initiate action to make the hotel chain regret its wicked ways. Wildmon did not specify what sort of action the AFA is considering, but the organization is known for calling for boycotts of various businesses with whose practices it does not agree. The AFA in the past has called for boycotts of both Disneyland (because of “gay days” at the park) and fast-food chain McDonald’s. Neither company reported a slump due to the AFA’s condemnation.

Marriott said it can’t just pull the plug on adult entertainment. It offers XXX movies under contract with LodgeNet at only a handful of the 3,000 Marriott-branded properties worldwide. Most Marriott hotels are owned and operated by franchisees, and each franchise operates within its own moral code.

First Amendment attorney Paul Cambria said the coalition’s push to remove porn from hotels is less about morality and more about furthering its own conservative social agenda. The so-called “moral majority” is hardly a majority when it comes to adult entertainment.

“It’s hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people going to hotels and watching this,” Cambria told the St. Petersburg Times.

Cambria isn’t alone in that assessment. Hotels wouldn’t be offering adult entertainment if people didn’t want it or it wasn’t profitable.

“If you go to a businessman’s hotel, you’ll see a very high percentage of adult programming,” entertainment analyst Dennis McAlpine told the PBS program Frontline in 2002. “It probably generates 80-percent of the profits of that system.”

Of course, not all U.S. hotels and motels offer in-room programming of an adult nature. Corpus Christi, TX-based Omni Hotels’ 40 properties dropped LodgeNet’s adult programming in 1999, citing support for “pro-family issues.” Initially, the chain expected to see a $1.8-million drop in revenues.

However, in the nine years since, Omni hasn’t noticed a change in people’s in-room movie-viewing expenditures.

“Generally speaking, people just shifted to something else,” according to Omni spokeswoman Caryn Kboudi.

Even in single towns, hoteliers are hardly in agreement about whether or not to offer in-room porn.

“If I had a daughter working the front desk, I wouldn’t want to subject her to selling that,” Tampa, FL-based McKibbon Hotel Management Chief Executive Officer John McKibbon told the St. Petersburg Times. McKibbon is a church deacon whose website’s welcome message cites a New Testament passage. “We may lose some business, but we don’t market that kind of product.”

On the other side of the issue is Tampa-based BayStar Hotel Group.

“We’ve always maintained it’s a matter of personal choice,” BayStar President George Glover told the Times. “We only hear about it in election years when the religious right gets revved up.”