We love arts and literature here at the Smoke Break. Our homes have real artwork on the walls and overflowing personal libraries. We each pursue artistic pasttimes. And we understand that art is subjective and what makes one person swoon just as quickly makes another person gag.
But like Potter Stewart so succinctly wrote in Jacobellis v. Ohio in 1964, “…pornography” is hard to define but “I know it when I see it.” So when it now comes to light that the National Endowment for the Arts is sending some $80 million of its stimulus spoils to support pornographic live theater in San Francisco, well, let’s just say we’re pretty disgusted.
Surely, we don’t care what blows your skirt up, but forcing everyone to help you get your jollies crosses the line. In truth, art is a luxury and when the unemployment rate is inching towards 10% and everyone is being asked to tighten their belts, there are far better uses for the money.
CounterPULSE received a $25,000 grant in the “Dance” category; a staffer there said they were pleased to receive the grant, “which over the next year will be used to preserve jobs at our small non-profit.”
(CounterPULSE, whose “long-running pansexual performance series” called “Perverts Put Out”, invites guests to “join your fellow pervs for some explicit, twisted fun.”)
Similarly, the director of Frameline, the gay and lesbian film house, told FOXNews.com in an e-mail that their $50,000 grant was not to support any program in particular.
“The grant is not intended for a specific program; it’s to be used for the preservation of jobs at our media arts nonprofit organization over the next year during the economic downturn,” wrote K.C. Price, who listed four other NEA grants his organization has received.
(Frameline recently screened Thundercrack: “Witness if you dare, the world’s only underground kinky art porno horror film, complete with four men, three women and a gorilla. You will be seduced into accepting this orgy of sexual liberation!”)
An NEA spokeswoman defended the agency’s choices and said its grants would help “preserve jobs in danger of going away or that had gone away because of the economic downturn.”
There are millions of small, non-profit organizations that make real life-saving contributions to society. Most are denied grants for operating expenses by both private foundations and by the government.
This is yet another outstanding example of the idiocy of this administration and this Congress. Not to mention its hypocrisy:
“…what I will need from all of you is unprecedented responsibility and accountability on all of our parts.”
“…a project that will waste that money, I will not hesitate to call them out on it and put a stop to it.”
“The American people are watching. They expect to see the money that they’ve earned, that they’ve worked so hard to earn, spent in its intended purposes without waste, without inefficiency, without fraud.”
(President Obama, United States Conference of Mayors, February 20, 2009)