‘Corn for Porn’ Swap Assures Arts, Interior Dept. Funding

Lawmakers from Western states abandoned Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) in droves Thursday, accepting a “corn for porn” deal that preserves grazing subsidies in exchange for keeping new anti-obscenity restrictions off federal arts grants.

On a 73-25 vote, the Senate reversed its support for Helms’ measure to impose prohibitions on subsidizing “patently offensive” sexual exhibits or performances.

The action effectively cleared the way for sending to President Bush a House-Senate compromise on a $12-billion appropriations bill financing the Interior Department and the National Endowment for the Arts in fiscal 1992. Bush, who had not stepped into the arts controversy, is expected to sign it.

The Senate had voted, 68 to 22, in September to include Helms’ anti-obscenity restriction on the NEA’s use of its $176-million budget as part of the bill, and the House endorsed it twice by better than 2-1 margins in October.

However, it was deleted in a compromise put together by Senate Appropriations Chairman Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Rep. Sidney R. Yates (D-Ill.). In exchange, Yates, Congress’ most stalwart NEA defender, abandoned a House-passed item that would have doubled the $1.97-a-head monthly grazing fee on federal land.

NEA critics and supporters of higher grazing fees derided what they called a “corn for porn” swap, but the House refused on a 214-205 vote last week to undo it.

A 1990 law prohibits the foundation from financing obscene material but leaves it to the courts to use criminal statutes to determine what is obscenity. Helms’ measure, adopting a definition used by the Federal Communications Commission, said that no tax dollars can be used “to promote, disseminate or produce materials that depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual or excretory activities or organs.”