Censorship and the Arts Reach Boiling Point : Politics: Some observers say the uproar over 2 Live Crew and the NEA controversy represent a much larger and more alarming trend. : NEWS ANALYSIS

A confluence of seemingly separate events--the Florida obscenity imbroglio over the rap group2 Live Crew and the Washington meltdown of the National Endowment for the Arts--has intensified concern in the arts community over far broader threats to freedom of expression.

It is--and always has been--a mistake, so this thinking concludes, to perceive the 2 Live Crew and NEA crises as unrelated entities. They are part, say an increasingly diverse array of observers, of a single, much larger and more alarming trend.

The two issues, these observers contend, are intimately tied to such events of the recent past as attempts to slap warning labels on record covers, organized campaigns against television advertisers condemned for sponsoring violent or allegedly immoral television programs, the campaign to suppress the motion picture “The Last Temptation of Christ” and the battle over enactment of a constitutional amendment to ban physical destruction of the American flag.

To many observers, the situation is not a collection of episodes or controversies at all, but a single, national issue driven by an organized, well-financed right wing struggling to retain influence in the face of communism’s decline and setbacks on a variety of constitutional fronts, from abortion rights to flag burning.

Even the separate components have had political overtones from the beginning. The record-labeling battle, for instance, was supported by a Washington group called the Parents Music Resource Center--led by the wives of then-Treasury Secretary James Baker and Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.).

Michael Greene, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, addressed the issue last week at a press conference at which choreographer Bella Lewitzky said she was turning down a $72,000 NEA grant rather than sign the equivalent of an anti-obscenity loyalty oath.

The broad, diverse controversy, Greene said, “affects all of the arts. If any of you believe there are not absolutely interconnected elements here, you are not getting the picture.”

The arrests and lawsuits across the country have brought the issue of censorship to the boiling point, according to New York-based First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams.

“A significant minority, or maybe even a majority, is getting angrier and angrier at the forms of expression that routinely have become available in American life,” he said. “One of the real tests of a dedication of a people to free expression is always whether they are willing to protect expression that they find really distasteful.

“We are at a turning point in enforcement of the obscenity laws,” he said. “I don’t separate the 2 Live Crew album from the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit. (Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS last year, was a New York photographer whose sometimes sexually provocative images have played a key role in the NEA controversy.)

“Within the past few months we have seen the first prosecution of (the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati) for exhibiting (the Mapplethorpe show) and the prosecution of (2 Live Crew) for performing music on stage. Obscenity laws are being used or misused to punish and limit the use of expression in different fields.”

A handful of individuals and organizations, so this line of thinking goes, have orchestrated significant parts of these seemingly unrelated controversies. Actors include Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita), and televangelists such as Virginia-based Pat Robertson and the Pomona-based Focus on the Family.

But of all the players, none is apparently more broadly influential than the American Family Assn., the Tupelo, Miss., organization run by the Rev. Donald Wildmon. The group, founded by Wildmon as the National Federation for Decency in 1977, has established itself as a role-player--center stage or behind the scenes--in virtually every free expression controversy of the last five years.

The group reportedly played a causative role in the 2 Live Crew controversy by sending a transcript--made in California by Focus on the Family--of the group’s lyrics to a conservative radio talk-show host last January. Wildmon’s group touched off the NEA firestorm last year by complaining about arts endowment support of an exhibit that included the Andres Serrano photograph “Piss Christ.”

The association’s financial records and other documentary sources show it was heavily involved in working to oppose release of Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and that it has played various roles in campaigns to force labeling of popular music lyrics and to clamp subject-matter controls on television programming.

The Wildmon group’s latest federal tax return, obtained by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, includes a notation that it spent $80,000 to organize a “boycott of two sponsors of sex, violence, profanity and anti-Christian stereotyping on TV.” Wildmon’s articles of incorporation, which were filed recently as an exhibit in a defamation and copyright infringement lawsuit against Wildmon by a New York artist, show his group is chartered “to promote decency in the American society,” “to educate the American population to the negative effects of violence and crime in the media” and “to do all those things necessary for the promulgation of the Judaic-Christian ethic in America.”

Wildmon has repeatedly declined requests for interviews. But in a recent fund appeal, this was Wildmon’s characterization of the American Family Assn.’s role in the broader issues of freedom of expression:

“In every major moral battle fought over the past several years, you and your fellow AFA members have formed the foundation those battles were fought on. You are a vital part of the moral battle going on in America. When your fellow Christians see and know you’ve taken action, it inspires them to act; you give them the courage.”

Financially, Wildmon has clearly struck a rich vein. In 1984, according to its tax return, the AFA took in nearly $1.4 million in donations. By 1987, the total rose to more than $3.2 million. For the fiscal year that ended on June 30 of last year--the last period for which the Internal Revenue Service has received a return--the group raised more than $5.2 million. The 1988-89 fiscal year had seen the initiation of the NEA fight and high points on several of Wildmon’s other fields of battle.

The Wildmon group’s 1989 filing with the IRS said its monthly newsletter has a circulation of 200,000 and its magazine a monthly distribution of 380,000. In March of 1989, the month in which the campaign against the Serrano photo was first organized, the AFA claimed to have distributed an additional 1 million letters to supporters culled from a variety of right wing mailing lists. It said the monthly newsletter and the special Serrano photo mailing cost $2.2 million, alone. The AFA claims 350 affiliate state and local chapters, as well as subsidiary groups in Canada and Australia.

Headquartered about 125 miles southeast of Memphis, Tenn., the Wildmon group has a staff of 17 but, according to Mississippi observers familiar with the AFA, it maintains a very low profile in Tupelo itself. Donald Wildmon receives a $48,952 annual salary and a $14,400 annual housing allowance, according to IRS filings, and, of six top jobs other than Wildmon’s, two are held by his close relatives.

Until recently, the organizational sophistication of Wildmon and his allies kept arts forces on the defensive. Observers have said that as in the cases of stand-up comics Lenny Bruce in the ‘60s and George Carlin in the ‘70s--who found themselves under arrest or sued for performing allegedly obscene material--support for 2 Live Crew is going to have to come first from within the entertainment industry before the average citizen will take the issue seriously.

As a direct result of arrests of two of 2 Live Crew’s performers during a Florida appearance last week, a ban on sales of the group’s album, “As Nasty as They Wanna Be,” in Ft. Lauderdale (and warnings of similar action in San Antonio, Tex.), the Los Angeles chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is reviving a music industry coalition called the Musical Majority, according to chapter president and record company president Danny Goldberg.

“There’s a similarity between the censorship issue and the abortion issue,” he said. “Just as the Webster decision (making abortion rights a province of each state instead of the federal government) galvanized American women who were passively supportive of pro-choice a year ago, the chilling picture of a music artist being put into the back of a police car may galvanize entertainers.”

Donald Hall is a former poet laureate of the state of New Hampshire who, though he is a Democrat, came to know and like former New Hampshire governor--and now White House chief of staff--John Sununu. To Hall, what has happened in American society in recent years is a product of a complex of factors. Among them is a thin veneer of sophistication in the society--evidenced, Hall said, by friends of his in rural New Hampshire who have seldom strayed far from their small home village, but who went to see the movie “On Golden Pond” because its story was set in the state.

“They were profoundly offended and embarrassed by some of the words they heard,” Hall recalled. “I feel for many people who are genuinely offended. I think they can be people who are perfectly sincere about their deep aversion and sense of shock and horror and I sympathize.”

But to Hall and other observers, what has happened is that, for a meld of political and financial reasons, various political operatives have moved to exploit what would otherwise be part of the normal social discourse of the country over such issues as art and taste.

“It seems to me that politicians and fund-raisers--and this probably has more to do with raising funds than it does with gathering votes--have found they can press certain buttons,” he said, “particularly when you can start talking about something like sadomasochistic homosexuality.”

In fact, some conservative fund-raisers have said publicly that the financial promise of blowing air on the fire of freedom of expression is the most attractive part of the equation. One fund-raiser has even called the NEA controversy “the Willie Horton of 1990,” a reference to the controversy over the Massachusetts work-release prisoner that contributed to the undoing of Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election.

“There have been times in the 20th Century when the country seems to be divided culturally between those who are comfortable with change and those who yearn for simpler, more homogenous times, and I think that’s what we’re seeing,” said Jonathan Fanton, a historian and president of the New School for Social Research in New York City, which is suing the NEA, hoping a court will rule that obscenity-control requirements instituted by the endowment this year are unconstitutional.

“Some people are comfortable with American pluralism--the kind of racial and philosophical and ethnic mix we have in the country--and some are not,” Fanton said. “I believe these episodes (such as 2 Live Crew or NEA) become symbols or surrogates for this deeper cultural divide. If you were to look back for another period which perhaps might be analogous, you could take the 1920s and think of the battle over Prohibition and the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and the huge amount of attention focused on the Scopes Monkey Trial. It’s another time when you see a series of issues that are not necessarily related, and yet you have a feeling they are part of some larger whole.”

An issue as disturbing in its own way as censorship is also raised by the 2 Live Crew controversy, according to American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Carol Sobel. “One of the things that has not been discussed all that much is the race implications of this kind of censorship,” she said.

Banning of black music dates back 50 years to a time when Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” was banned from record stores and radio play lists because it condemned lynching, Sobel said. Early black rock artists like Little Richard and Chuck Berry suffered legal harassment and arrests that white counterparts like Elvis Presley never faced, she added.

The crackdown on 2 Live Crew can be seen as part of a tradition of perpetuating racism and segregation through censorship, Sobel asserted.

Part of what has occurred, of course, is simply that the arts have been dragged into the national political rough and tumble--a role for which the arts and artists have been ill-prepared.

“The idea that the arts would become an issue for political rallying or financial rallying is, of course, disturbing,” said Michael Kahn, artistic director at the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger in Washington.

To Kahn, the trend that has clearly taken hold is disturbing, indeed, since, he contends, it has only been recently that artists have shed the last vestiges of paranoia and fear left over from the McCarthy days of the 1950s.

“When the arts are politicized, we have paid a great price for it,” Kahn said. “For decades, there was less dissenting art (than there should have been) and, in theater in particular, it took a long time to recover from the point when the playwright did not address social issues out of fear and producers would not produce plays for the same reasons.

“The arts are always meant to both celebrate and criticize a society. That’s the point.”

Chuck Philips contributed to this article.

THE NEXT STEP Eventually, 2 Live Crew and its attorneys may find themselves facing the nine Supreme Court justices for a determination on whether “As Nasty as They Wanna Be” is nasty enough to be declared legally obscene. But, for the moment, their appeal of Florida Federal District Court Judge Jose Gonzalez’s decision will go first to a three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Appeals court. The appeal has not yet been filed; after filing, it could take as much as a year before it is heard. Under the so-called George Carlin “seven dirty words” decision handed down by the high court in 1973, speech and other forms of expression must fail a three-part test in order to be declared legally obscene. To be declared obscene, according to that standard, something must be “patently offensive” to community standards, lack “serious artistic, political or scientific value” or appeal primarily to prurient interests. According to legal experts, it could be several years before the 2 Live Crew case comes up for a Supreme Court ruling.