Dannemeyer, Rohrabacher and the NEA Controversy

In the article on Rep. Dana Rohrabacher’s battle against the National Endowment for the Arts (“Arts and the Hill,” Sept. 27), his supporter, Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), is quoted as arguing that the toleration of homosexuality in Germany in the 1920s was the symptom of moral decay.

It is hardly necessary to point out to Dannemeyer that those who ended toleration for homosexuals as part of the Holocaust were Hitler and the Nazis.

Does Dannemeyer consider their life style an improvement--because they were heterosexuals--on that of the homosexuals they did not tolerate? Was there any decay of civilization worse than that of the Nazis?

The moral is obvious and Dannemeyer should take it to heart.

Rohrabacher (R-Lomita), who is somewhat given to double talk in his defense of his misguided attempt to censor the endowment, is, nevertheless, to be commended for condemning the gay-bashing motives of Dannemeyer and Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and for his promise not to use his office as a forum to attack people’s personal life styles.

ARNOLD T. SCHWAB, Westminster