When Romney left to take over the 2002 Winter Olympics, a Marriott statement described him as an "active, hands-on director."

Marriott refused to say if its contract with On Command was ever discussed or voted upon by the board, saying the directors' votes and meeting minutes are proprietary.

Marriott now contracts with LodgeNet Entertainment Corp., which bought On Command last year.

Gary Glenn, president of American Family Association of Michigan, a conservative group, said: "The Marriott Corporation may be tap dancing around this subject, but a candidate for president should not be able to."

Marriott International has more than 500,000 hotel rooms and annual revenues exceeding $10 billion. While the Marriott name is on more than 2,800 buildings, the corporation owns only about a dozen hotels. The rest are owned by franchises, lessening corporate control over their activities.

Romney, 60, has close links to the corporation, which opened its first hotel in 1957. Not only did he serve on its board of directors, but his given first name — "Willard" — is in honor of the hotel chain's founder, J. Willard Marriott. Marriott and Romney's father, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, were friends and rose through industry together.

In June 2000, J.W. "Bill" Marriott Jr., the son of Marriott's founder, defended the distribution of pornographic movies, saying they were inseparable from the rest of the chain's TV offerings.

"The in-room entertainment operators who provide our systems rely upon a certain volume of movie types in order to be economically viable," Bill Marriott wrote to Bill Johnson, executive director of the Michigan-based American Decency Association. "If we were to eliminate the 'R' and non-rated offerings, the systems would not be economic."

No all hotel chains have the same policy. Omni Hotels announced in late 1999 it would no longer offer pay-per-view movies in its rooms. Ritz-Carlton, the hotel name synonymous with luxury, also does not offer in-room pornography — even though it is owned by Marriott International.

Daniel Weiss, media analyst for James Dobson's "Focus on the Family," said this week in a radio broadcast to Focus members: "If (Romney) made money off pornography in the past, is he going to turn a blind eye to it if he's president? Because as chief executive of the nation, it's his responsibility to make sure our nation's obscenity laws are efficiently and vigorously enforced."

Romney linked the prevalence of pornography to the Virginia Tech shooting spree that left 33 dead.

"Pornography and violence poison our music and movies and TV and video games," Romney said May 5 during a commencement address at Regent University, the evangelical Christian school run by Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.

"The Virginia Tech shooter, like the Columbine shooters before him, had drunk from this cesspool."