LOS ANGELES — Vivid Entertainment co-founder Steven Hirsch is glad Rick Santorum has dropped out of the race for the GOP Presidential nomination.
In an interview with Politico, Hirsch said the Republican hopeful, who has been skewered by the media for imposing his own conservative social views, and for particularly blasting the porn industry with harebrained ramblings, had no facts to back up his claims.
He noted that in the Internet age candidates need to have facts to back up what they say and Santorum’s lack of hard information prompted the industry to lash out.
But Hirsch also quipped that Santorum's ramblings provided great “fodder” for taking shots at him.
Despite being an easy target because of his off-the-cuff rants, Hirsch said he was concerned beacuse Santorum was “bad for the country” and “doesn’t seem to have his finger on the pulse of what’s really going on out there."
"Again, this is 2012. People are more comfortable with sexually explicit material than ever before. I think this country has some bigger problems that they have to deal with than whether or not someone’s watching an adult film on their computer,” Hirsch said.
Hirsch took special umbrage over Santorum’s stance on porn being bad for women.
“The fact of the matter is the girls run the industry. They’re the ones who make all the decisions …And for someone like Rick Santorum to come out and just take a shot out of nowhere because he thinks that he’s going to sort of appeal to his constituency, doesn’t work in 2012,” he said.
When asked about Mitt Romney, the likely GOP candidate, Hirsch said that he’s moved more to the right as Santorum did but “well have to see.”
The Vivid chief stressed that the porn industry almost always backs the Democratic nominee and will likely rally behind President Obama.
“I think that, historically, Democrats have chosen not to go after the industry. I think that if you look at what President Obama has done is he’s taken that money and those funds and he’s put it towards child pornography and gone after and spent as many resources as possible to try to go after the people who are child pornographers and that’s where the money should go. I don’t think he feels that the government should be involved in taking away people’s freedom of speech, freedom to view whatever they want in the privacy of their own home. I think that’s been the Democratic stance for many years,” Hirsch said.
He noted that Democrats tend to be hands off when it comes to hardcore porn but in contrast, Republicans target "mainstream pornographers."
Republicans say they want less government, Hirsch maintained, unless it comes to moral issues when it’s “'Ah! Government should be involved because the government knows what you should think and what you should watch’ and I think ultimately that is dangerous.”
