Republican Mitt Romney insists his No. 1 job is fixing the economy but a former Reagan administration anti-porn prosecutor says the candidate's campaign has assured him that he also will "vigorously" crack down on pornographers if he is elected president.
Patrick Trueman, a former head of the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section and now the head of Morality in Media, told the conservative Daily Caller that he was quietly promised that fighting porn will be a top priority in a Romney White House.
Trueman said he and another anti-porn prosecutor from the 1980s Justice Department, Bob Flores, met earlier this year with Alex Wong, Romney's foreign and legal policy director..
“Wong assured us that Romney is very concerned with this, and that if he’s elected these laws will be enforced,” Trueman told the website. ”They promised to vigorously enforce federal adult obscenity laws.”
Around the time Trueman says he received those assurances, Romney signed Morality in Media's anti-porn pledge along with Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, whom he was still battling for the GOP nomination. Since then, he hasn't mentioned the issue very often.
Romney seemed to say the right words for Trueman in 2007, when he was campaigning for president in Iowa the last time. "We got to clean up the water that our kids are swimming in," he said in a TV ad. "And by that I mean the pornography, the drug culture, the violence, the sex, the perversion that bombards them day in and day out. So I want to make sure we enforce our obscenity laws."
Romney has promised that if elected president he would require every new computer be sold with a porn filter.
Despite those tough words, Romney's campaign has taken campaign cash from the head of a company that produces hard-core pornography. And gay porn filmmaker Michael Lucas, who has endorsed Romney, told the Daily Caller, “I don’t see any danger coming from Romney when it comes to porn. It’s just not there."
There may be another reason Romney isn't talking up porn: he needs the support of millions of primary voters who supported Ron Paul, who did not make opposition to sexually explicit materials a campaign plank.
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