speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

The Poverty of Civil Libertarianism
defunded study's questions about homosexual behaviour. Their real
purpose was "not to stop the spread of AIDS . . . [but] to compile
supposedly scientific and Government-sanctioned statistics supporting
ultra-liberal arguments that homosexuality is normal behavior."
The National Institutes of Health cancelled a conference on "Genetic
Factors in Crime" after objections by the Congressional Black
Caucus. 42
Because artistic taste is strongly associated with status groups,
government support is a hotly contested terrain. Shortly after its
launch in the 1960s, the National Endowment for the Arts became
embroiled in a three-week furor because it had funded an improvisation
for Baltimore schoolchildren, which used the word "bullshit."
43 Two decades later, perhaps hoping that a lawyer would
avoid such flaps, George Bush appointed John E. Frohnmayer to
head the N EA. One of his first acts was to suspend a $10,000 grant to
"Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing," a New York exhibition about
AIDS, because the catalogue contained an essay by AIDS-victim
David Wojnarowicz criticising Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-
Calif) and Sen. Jesse Helms, among others. Frohnmayer's justification
revealed the incoherence of any aspiration to neutrality.
I think it's essential that we remove politics from grants and must
do so if the endowment is to remain credible to the American
people and to Congress. Obviously, there are lots of great works of
art that are political. Picasso's Guernica and the plays of Bertholt
Brecht are strongly political. But the question is, Should the
endowment be funding art whose primary intent is political? . . .
The catalogue to this show is a very angry protest against the
specific events and individuals involved over the last eight months
in the most recent arts legislation in Congress [which prohibited
the Endowment from funding "materials considered obscene,
including sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the sexual exploitation
of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts"]. It's very
inflammatory.
Helms, who had sponsored the restrictive legislation, "was much
more pleased by this than he was by the N.E.A.'s reaction under the
former acting chairman to the Mapplethorpe exhibition." Dannemeyer,
who contended that homosexuality was curable acquired
behaviour, commended Frohnmayer "for doing what I think Congress
told him to do." Within three years, however, Bush fired
Frohnmayer, fearing that Republican presidential candidate Patrick
46