A moral pornucopia: When Janet Jackson's bejeweled boob made an abrupt appearance at the 2004 Super Bowl, "moral values" guardians like Tom Delay, Joe Lieberman, and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) shrieked the loudest. Aware that Fortune 500 companies use seedy low-profile subsidiaries to expand profits, Wilson exploded at Viacom president Mel Karmazin during decency hearings on Nipplegate. Her voice reportedly cracking and eyes filling with tears, she said: "You knew what you were doing. You knew that shock and indecency creates a buzz that moves market share and lines your pockets." But according to a new report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), shock and indecency also moves political campaigns.

An ardent anti-porn crusader, Wilson has accepted $47,000 in contributions from smut-related industries in the last two election cycles—and she’s not alone. CREW’s report spotlights the top 15 anti-porn Congresspeople—13 Republicans and 2 Democrats—who received at least ten grand from companies profiting from adult entertainment. These contributions come from hotels (an industry that makes $190 million a year in pay-per-view adult entertainment sales), cable and satellite companies (corporations that rake in $1 billion annually on pay-per-view and video-on-demand programming with adult content), phone companies and internet providers (AT&T alone made $20 million a month on broadband porn offerings in 2002). CREW's executive director suggests a new prize, the "Forked Tongue Awards," for people like Sen. Sam Brownback, a Republican who received $17,000 in donations from an industry he equates with cocaine peddlers, and John McCain, who positioned himself as the anti-porn candidate in the 2000 presidential election but went on to collect $46,000 from smut-related companies. That prominent conservative Republicans who tsk-tsk the widespread availability of naughty content raked in the most—DeLay ($24,000), Charles Pickering ($52,000), Fred Upton of Michigan ($56,500)—begs an obvious question: when will American voters stop rewarding "moral values" hypocrites? Or, better yet, when will they stop rewarding cynics: these Congresspeople seem convinced that voters won't make the connection, just as the veil between major corporations’ smily-face public images and their backdoor profit centers will never be torn down by the media, the companies, or, least of all, politicos themselves, who are most likely to benefit.