Randy, no one was questioning the legality of it, at least according to man's laws. And I don't think that anyone made the accusation that he was phoning in the orders himself. Being on a board means that you help provide leadership. If he had no time to spend on it, he shouldn't have accepted the position. If he did have even a little time, then I think that pornography is something worth standing up against.
As the article said, many people got their start on pornography by seeing it in a hotel room. If Romney didn't think that it was worth spending his limited time on this issue, what does he think is important to spend time on? We're not talking micromanaging, such as determining how many towels go into each room. We're talking about at least taking a stand against a great evil, instead of taking it in stride.
My main question about Romney is, what does he think is worth taking a stand against? We don't need a good businessman as leader of our country. We need a great statesman who is willing to take a stand on the important issues. What issues does Romney think are worthy of taking a stand for?

Do we know that Romney didn't try to do anything about it? What if there was a majority vote thing going on?

I've wondered about situations like this... like on Judgment Day, all of a sudden it becomes so clear that they sold their soul... or, it really doesn't harm their salvation much after all...

Aw, crap. I flick boogies at Al Gore because his mansion uses five to ten times as much energy as my house does. I guess I gotta flick one at Romney too.

I'd prefer that Romney could point to the letter, or press release, or meeting he had, where he made his position against Marriott quite clear at the time. Even if it wasn't his job, even if it made no difference. I'd prefer Al Gore walk his talk too.

Well, again, I gotta look at Romney as someone who has lived under the public's microscope for over a decade, and all we can find on him is a weak dotted-line to Marriott hotel pornography, a stream of dog poo from Ontario to Massachusets, and a record of changing his opinions. He's still leaps and bounds above everyone else, IMO.

HSR

Mitt Romney should probably also have gone down to the grocery store in his neighborhood and warned them that he would no longer patronize their store if they continued to sell beer.

Perhaps each of us should do that as well.

However, that's not in my mind a disqualifying charge.

I'll close my participation in this thread by quoting Charles Mitchell, an Evangelical who hates pornography, because he writes better than I do:

"The stuff that is available in hotel rooms these days--not to mention on the Internet--makes me sick. But to seriously argue it's within the purview of one member of a for-profit Board of Directors to champion such an issue evinces a total misunderstanding of directors' role. Lay boards, by definition, are not involved in day-to-day operations. Members typically have their own firms to manage--that is what they are immersed in day-to-day. What they do is come together periodicially, get deluged in information, and make extremely high-level decisions. They don't ask if the scrambled eggs are any good, the elevator mirrors are clean, or the TVs are porn-free. It's just not their job, no matter how important non-runny eggs, non-streaky mirrors, or non-disgusting programming may be to them."

Well, maybe it's sort of like seeing the person smoking and go calling him on it... we don't do that as LDSs, because it makes us look "holier-than-thou" right? We just "love" them out of it. Maybe he was showing the board his unconditional love.

Maybe we should tax it like we do cigarettes.  With the amount of profit it generates, we could probably pay off the national debt and balance the budget by the time Pres. Bush leaves office.  While lowering personal tax at the same time.  Everybody wins, except for the pornographers, of course.

They're proposing a huge tax on porn in San Francisco. I imagine that would pretty much double the city's annual budget.
And Ray, given that you don't consider pornography to be an issue worth standing up against, what issues do you hope that Romney will stand up for? What do you hope that he will accomplish while in office? 'Cause it seems to me that he doesn't stand up for anything.
This would have been a non-issue if he had even said to the board something like "If it were up to me, I'd get rid of porn in all our hotel rooms."

Here's another thing that I thought of: the office of president of the US is similar in many ways to being on a company's board. You don't have time to handle every detail of how the entity you oversee runs. I think it's fair to say that the way he acted on a company's board would be very similar to how he'd act as president.
The president doesn't necessarily have to attack the issue of pornography directly, of course. But he could work with the congress to rein in the supreme court and get them out of the business of reading new rights into the constitution. There is no right in the constitution to pornography. If it were left up to the states and local governments to determine whether or not to allow it, that would be ideal.

Best Western gives a kick-butt military/government discount.