Anti-Gay Vote Cuts Art Funds in Ga. County

In a backlash against recent political gains made by homosexuals in Atlanta and the increased national visibility of gay issues, officials in suburban Cobb County voted Tuesday to cut off all county funding of the arts, an action that grew out of an earlier plan to fund only art the government deems in support of “traditional family values.”

The unanimous vote came two weeks after the commission became perhaps the first government body in America to broadly condemn homosexuality as incompatible with community standards.

“I think this is a sad day for Cobb County,” said Palmer Wells, managing director of Theater in the Square, a local theater company whose production of the play “Lips Together, Teeth Apart” is at the center of the controversy.

As a police SWAT team stood on alert nearby, about 80 protesters gathered on the street beneath the commissioners’ offices after the meeting, chanting, “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Cobb Commission, KKK” and “shame.”

After several weeks of increasing acrimony between gays and anti-gay factions, commission members tried to deflect controversy Tuesday by presenting the vote as an economics issue.

“Censorship is not the issue before us,” said Commission Chairman Bill Bryne. “The real issue is how our local tax dollars are being spent and the priorities of the government of Cobb County.”

He said the $123,000 the county would have spent this year on the arts will be used to equip police cars with video cameras and for trained dogs for the county’s K-9 unit.

But the hundreds who overflowed the commissioners’ meeting room and who packed the Marietta town square north of Atlanta the past two weekends for rallies, pro and con, made it clear that for them the issue is gay rights and who would determine moral standards for the community.

Although some spokesmen for arts organizations said the amount the county spent on the arts was “embarrassingly small” and the withdrawal of it would not put established arts organizations out of business, they nevertheless predicted that the measures would damage the county’s image and perhaps cause conventions and relocating corporations to look to other locales.

However, the move was applauded by conservative religious groups, which had urged the commission to cut off all arts funding if that was necessary to end public support of projects they find objectionable.

“Art can be used as a weapon to open the door to gay lifestyles, to desensitize people to their culture,” said Joan Jordan, who spoke at a public hearing on the issue Tuesday. Homosexuals “have a larger agenda than just arts funding. They’re using this to get their foot in the door and to demand greater, bigger things that are anti-traditional moral standards,” she said.

The proposal to cut off all arts funding developed after gay groups threatened the county with lawsuits if the cuts were aimed at gay arts organizations or arts projects with gay themes.

While toothless, the condemnatory measure passed two weeks ago was the first blanket public condemnation of homosexuality in the United States by an elected government body, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force said.

Other measures critical of homosexual issues in states including Colorado, Oregon, Florida and Michigan were started by citizen initiatives or were more narrowly focused at limiting gay rights, the task force said.

Both Cobb County measures were specifically spurred by complaints generated by local production of “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” a play by Terrence MacNalley that also is being performed at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. The critically acclaimed play has only heterosexual characters but it has references to homosexuality which many local citizens found objectionable.

The measures also seem to be an indication of growing resentment over the increasing visibility--in Atlanta and nationally--of what local anti-gay leaders call “the homosexual agenda.”

Leaders of the conservative religious groups supporting the measures point to recent passage of a bill in Atlanta that legally recognizes live-in partners of the same sex, Gov. Zell Miller’s invitation to the Gay Olympics to hold their games in Atlanta and President Clinton’s recent proposal to drop the ban on gays in the military.

“In the span of three decades, we’ve become the most permissive society in the world,” said Hal Suit, a longtime local television news personality who was the Republican nominee defeated by Jimmy Carter in the 1970 race for governor.

He received a standing ovation at a public hearing on the issue Tuesday afternoon before Cobb County commissioners when he said, “It is time to draw a line in the sand and take a stand.”

For others, the line is already drawn--it is the boundary separating Cobb County from Atlanta. The struggle for them is to keep the evils of the outside world out. As one speaker told the commission: “We’re not Atlanta, we’re not DeKalb (County), we’re not America--we’re Cobb County.”

Cobb County, an area known for its conservatism and insularity, has 447,745 people, is overwhelmingly white and decidedly middle class. In an effort to block access to outsiders, the county rejected proposals to extend MARTA, Atlanta’s mass transit system, into the county.

The commission received 6,000 phone calls in support of dropping all art funding after Commissioner Gordon Wysong sponsored the initial measures condemning homosexuality and promoting art that celebrated family values, officials said.