A call for hotels to stop promoting pornography

Our purpose is not to condemn you and your company but to call you to your highest and best self. We have no desire to hurt your business. On the contrary, we want you and your business to succeed financially — for your sake; for the sake of your stockholders, employees and contract partners; and for the sake of the communities that your hotels serve. We believe that the properly regulated market economy serves the good of all by providing products and services at reasonable prices and by generating prosperity and social mobility. But the market itself cannot provide the moral values that make it a truly humane and just institution. We — owners, managers, employees, customers — must bring those values to the market. There are some things — inhuman things, unjust things, de-humanizing things — that should not be sold. There must be some things that, for the sake of human dignity and the common good, we must refuse to sell — even it if means forgoing profit.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and serves on the Desert News Editorial-Advisory Board. Shaykh Hamza Yusuf is co-founder and a member of the faculty of Zaytuna College. Affiliations are provided for identification purposes and do not imply institutional endorsements.