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Downtown Fredericksburg's next hotel should leave behind pay-per-view porn

Date published: 5/24/2006

X marks the Marriott

A downtown hotel should be compatible with Fredericksburg's best values

TOMMY MITCHELL'S plan to build a Courtyard by Marriott hotel in downtown Fredericksburg, announced in 2003, jolted city preservationists into Red Alert. Devotees of the unique downtown--a seawall against the sprawl that has flooded the city's outskirts--attacked the project's size, its design, the composition of its masonry, its corporate label, its potential to disrupt and reshape the city's soul. In short, newcomers and natives alike doubted the hotel's compatibility with that which makes Old Fredericksburg a special place to be.

Mr. Mitchell and his partners, Rich Palmer and Barry Gosnell of Northern Virginia, met rational concerns--an architectural redesign, for example, harmonized the hotel's exterior with the downtown viewscape--and City Council overrode raw anti-corporate bias to give the Mitchell-Palmer-Gosnell group provisional approval to build its Courtyard at the corner of Caroline and Charlotte streets. Preliminary digging is now taking place.

But in their compatibility catechism, which focused on the outwardly visible, the skeptics left out a question. Remember the old joke about the liberal who, wandering into a strip joint and seeing a 15-year-old girl onstage engaged in live sex, is outraged--outraged!--to find that she's not being paid minimum wage? City critics' capacity for lividness, which burned bright when the hotel's developers proposed using some ersatz brick, should have extended to Marriott International's sullied reputation for showing hard-core, X-rated movies to guests.

To fault Marriott for purveying porn, in a society in which porn is almost as ubiquitous as the home computers and TV cable systems that carry it, may seem fogyish. Anyway, the innkeeper's job is to replicate the comforts of home, even those morally checkered. Few scold Marriott for replacing the dining-room liquor cabinet with the hotel mini-bar or selling gift-shop cigarettes to traveling smokers. But mounting evidence suggests that porn, in its personal and social consequences, is less like whiskey and smokes than the opium that once ravaged imperial China. Nor does all this evidence come from religious and conservative groups.

Pornography's effects on the family, the bedrock of society, are often devastating. Sixty-two percent of the attorneys attending the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers' November 2002 meeting said that the Internet had been a "significant" factor in divorces they had handled during the previous year. Some 56 percent of those cases involved one party's obsessiveness with Internet porn.

Date published: 5/24/2006