Campaign to Abolish NEA Renewed

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Long Beach) renewed a demand Wednesday that the National Endowment for the Arts be abolished or subject to stringent new controls in the wake of the acquittal last week of a Cincinnati museum and its director on obscenity charges.

As Rohrabacher and other conservative opponents of the NEA began marshaling their forces for key congressional votes expected today or Friday, they began linking the fate of the arts endowment with the Cincinnati verdict.

The Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati and its director, Dennis Barrie, had been charged with pandering obscenity in a misdemeanor indictment after displaying a controversial traveling exhibit of photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe that were partly funded by the NEA.

Rohrabacher asserted that the verdict, which was returned Friday by an eight-person jury, established that NEA support of any art project effectively renders the art, no matter how controversial it may be, impervious to obscenity laws.

NEA supporters, led by Rep. Pat Williams (D-Mont.) and Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), have sought to avoid enactment of controls over specific kinds of work the NEA can support by barring funding only if work is judged by a court to be obscene under prevailing U.S. Supreme Court precedents.

“No court will hold obscene a work which is deemed to have artistic merit by a federal art panel,” Rohrabacher said. “In fact, (NEA reauthorization legislation proposed by Williams and Rep. Tom Coleman (R-Mo.)) would open the door to federal subsidies for anything, no matter how freakish, pornographic or sacrilegious--that an NEA panel would approve.”

Rohrabacher released a letter sent to members of Congress by the leaders of 20 conservative political and religious groups that complained that “a court in Cincinnati has just decided that even the Mapplethorpe S & M and child porn photographs are not obscene.” (Five of the 175 photos depicted in the Mapplethorpe show, on which the Cincinnati charges were based, depicted homoerotic images and two showed children with genitals exposed.)

Separately, it was learned that South Central Bell Telephone Co. had cut off billing service to a San Francisco-based group raising money to oppose Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) in his reelection campaign. The California organization, the First Amendment Crisis Team, has published advertisements in at least three newspapers urging readers to dial a 900 telephone number and have a $9.99 contribution to the anti-Helms group billed to their own telephones.

South Central Bell, a subsidiary of Bell South, said it took the action under a corporate policy, adopted earlier this year, barring use of 900 number billing services for political activities.