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.

Family breakups catalyzed by pornographic addictions are just one way that cheap, accessible, and privately viewed smut--the form provided to tens of thousands of hotel guests daily--hurts children. Fathers lost in labyrinths of online perversion give less paternal time and care, finds a study by Dr. J. P. Schneider in the journal Sexual and Relationship Therapy. Such fathers (and, sometimes, mothers) also can jeopardize their families financially when they furtively feed their porn cravings at work or run up large credit-card debt on premium porn. Moreover, the marital tensions created by pornographic compulsions torture entire family units--so says Jill Manning, Ph.D., a family therapist who last year summarized for Congress the research on the subject. "I've treated patients age 5 to 67 for pornographic-related problems," Dr. Manning tells us, adding, "Pornography pollutes the way we see the world."

Among hotels, Marriott, with about 2,800 properties, is a major polluter. In the United States, it's estimated, more than 90 percent of Marriotts provide in-room porn. Marriott, along with the Hilton and Westin chains, received special attention as a corporate smut peddler in a 2002 Frontline report called "American Porn." Entertainment analyst Dennis McAlpine told the public-television show that "adult programming" generates up to 80 percent of the profits from the in-room movie services supplied the hotels by pay-per-view firms LodgeNet and On Command.

"For the hotel," said Mr. McAlpine, "it's extremely profitable because there's no cost." For every dollar's worth of "Throbbing Threesome" or "Spring Break Pantyhos" shown, Marriott gets to keep a dime. The dimes add up--to at least a quarter-billion dollars annually for the big hotel chains, say industry sources.

To its credit, Marriott has adjusted its standard hotel design to accommodate local themes and heritages. The Courtyard Magnificent Mile Downtown Chicago boasts an art deco look right at home amid the Windy City's skyscrapers. Minneapolis' The Depot, another Courtyard property, is a Renaissance Revival-style renovation of that city's most famous train station.

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