The Next Sexual Revolution? Hugh Hefner, Playboy Take On GOP

Well, there's a saying about this kind of thing: if you can't beat 'em, take to the pages of your magazine celebrating the nude female form and tell the Republican Party what's what.

Playboy Publising/Sexual Revolution icon Hugh Hefner has apparently heard all he cares to from Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and others about how sexuality will destroy America. He's heard so much, in fact, that Politico reports today that May's issue contains a full-page editorial denouncing GOP candidates' "war on sex" highlighted by campaign promises to curtail mandatory insurance provider coverage of contraception and further strides toward eliminating abortion.

Hefner quotes now-former candidate Rick Santorum's broad-strokes denouncement of birth control as "a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be," but also spares not surviving candidate Ron Paul's "believing that the birth control pill did not cause immorality but that immorality creates the problem of wanting to use the pill." He further calls out leading candidate Romney's claim that should he soon occupy the Oval Office, he would crusade to have pioneering the Supreme Court's pioneer Roe v. Wade abortion-rights ruling overturned.

Unlike many GOP voters, Hefner considers the assaults the worst possible kind of throwback.

"All these years later I hear echoes of this same ignorance espoused by a new crop of self-appointed arbiters who are determined to oversee our morality," Hefner writes, amid bragging rights about sexual liberties generations of Playboy followers fought to win. "I heard it when Santorum backer Foster Friess said, 'Back in my days, [women] used bayer aspirin for contraceptives,' implying that if women held an aspirin between their legs, they wouldn't open them. I heard it when I learned about proposed anti-abortion legislation in Kansas tha twould protect doctors who conceal vital medical infomration from pregnant women. And I heard it when Rush Limbaugh called a Georgetown University law student a 'slut' and a 'prostitute' after she testified on Capitol Hill about allowing employers to avoid providing contraception for religious reasons . . . Fifty years of sexual freedom vanished in a sound bite.

"If these zealots have their way, our hard-won sexual liberation - women's rights, reproductive rights and rights to privacy - lie in peril," he continued. "We won't let that happen . . . Welcome to the new sexual revolution."