Another Effort to Restrict the NEA Fails in the House

In an unexpected step along the way toward resolution of the political crisis facing the National Endowment for the Arts, a House committee on Tuesday easily thwarted an attempt by a Mississippi congressman to add to restrictions on the kinds of work the NEA can support.

It was unclear what the defeat of the restrictive wording offered by Rep. Jamie Whitten (D-Miss.) will mean for the NEA in Congress this year, but the Appropriations Committee’s action touched off a new round of speculation that the climax of the 15-month controversy is at hand.

But if confusion over the NEA’s ultimate fate seemed to have been at least slightly reduced by the Tuesday morning House committee vote, the arts endowment itself may have further muddied the situation with release of new guidelines detailing what kinds of work it will consider to be obscene--the arts agency’s third major attempt at clarifying the issue.

Conceding that its earlier forays into spelling out what it construes to be obscene had succeeded primarily in confusing the nation’s arts community, the NEA released revised obscenity guidelines. The new provisions warn of scrutiny of artworks that include “hard-core” images or literary references depicting masturbation, excretion or simulated sex.

In Congress, the House Appropriations Committee rejected on a voice vote a proposal by Whitten, the panel’s chairman, to insert in a stop-gap bill to provide money to keep the federal government operating through Oct. 20 a provision warning the NEA that it should avoid funding any art project that was obscene, indecent or might be offensive on religious grounds.

Later Tuesday, a top endowment official said the 20-day extension of the federal government’s spending authority simply extended restrictions on art content enacted in the 1990 budget law and, as a result, has no effect on NEA grant-making operations.

Rep. Sidney Yates (D-Ill.), chairman of an appropriations subcommittee with authority over the NEA, moved successfully to strike out Whitten’s restrictive language. Yates’s motion carried overwhelmingly and Whitten chose not to demand a recorded vote--which would have compelled anyone voting against him to do so for the record and possibly face assault by conservative political opponents.

Even if the stricture had passed, it would have had no direct statutory authority since it was contained in what Congress calls “report language”--wording that accompanies a bill and describes the intent of legislators who enacted it--but is not part of the bill’s statutory provisions.

The situation was further muddied by the fact that any stop-gap funding bill faces the threat of a veto by President Bush, who has indicated he would look with disfavor on any attempt at a legislative end run around mandatory budget deficit control provisions of the Gramm-Rudman act. The Gramm-Rudman cuts could be triggered within a few days if Congress and the White House fail to resolve an ongoing budget impasse.

But arts advocates had greeted the Whitten maneuver with concern because they feared it might be seen as an important symbolic message to the politically beleaguered NEA. “I thought it would be difficult to offer (the Yates motion) against a very strong chairman,” said Anne Murphy, executive director of the American Arts Alliance.

“I think they (House and Senate leaders) are headed towards resolution” of the 15-month controversy that has hamstrung the NEA since a controversy broke out over allegedly obscene and sacrilegious photographs last year, Murphy said.

“I hated to contemplate the necessity of a confrontation,” Yates said of the prospects for a fight with Whitten over NEA in the context of the stop-gap funding bill--known in Washington as a “continuing resolution.” Yates said that he was relieved when Whitten chose to surrender without a recorded vote.

Whitten’s district includes Tupelo, Miss., the headquarters of the Rev. Donald Wildmon’s American Family Assn. The conservative religious group has been a key leader of the anti-NEA fight across the country.

The endowment’s latest attempt to spell out what it considers obscene enough to violate language in the NEA’s 1990 appropriations bill was contained in a letter from a government lawyer representing the NEA to a judge handling a lawsuit against the endowment filed by the New School for Social Research in New York City.

The New School has challenged a requirement by the arts endowment that grant recipients certify in writing that they will not produce obscene work. The NEA imposed the controversial requirement--that is undergoing three court challenges--after an amendment was added to its funding bill this year that prohibits support of obscene work that does not meet high standards of artistic merit.

The NEA had earlier said it might rely on individual state pornography statutes to determine if disputed artwork was obscene. But the new government letter and revised NEA “obscenity guidelines” indicate that the arts endowment will instead rely on specific language in a landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court obscenity decision that spells out several specific “hard core” sex acts that may be construed to be obscene by federal agencies--regardless of how state smut laws may be applied.

Among these potentially verboten subjects for artistic treatment--either in visual arts, literature or other media--are such activities as masturbation, activities related to excretory functions and even simulated sex acts.

Julie Davis, the NEA’s general counsel, defended the latest guideline permutation, saying the new regulations did not materially change the arts endowment’s policy on obscenity. But, she conceded the NEA’s previous attempts at explaining what it might consider obscene had only confused the issue. “I thought there was enough confusion out there that we needed to clarify it for the record,” Davis said.