http://www.providencevisitor.com/weekly%20archives/04.12.01/letters.html
The Providence Visitor
Wrong to publicly fund sacrilegious art
Editor:
Anti-Catholicism has been called liberalism's anti-Semitism.
With Alma Lopez's identification as a Chicana lesbian ("Sante Fe bishop
says Guadalupe art 'sacrilegious,'" The Providence Visitor, April 5),
just imagine where her political sympathies lie. I can just see it now, the
usual parade of Hollywood liberal loonies and the American Civil Liberties
Union calling Archbishop Michael J. Sheehan's efforts censorship. Anything
that defiles or satirizes what Catholics hold sacred is to be considered a
valid work of art, worthy of public support. Would they view a sculpture of
Jesse Jackson eating a watermelon or a skit with Franklin Delano Roosevelt
stumbling around on a pair of rubber crutches as worthy of display in a public
museum or for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts? I think not.
Just look at how Rush Limbaugh, whose stock in trade is ridicule of liberals,
is treated by the left.
Categorize me as a white libertarian, pro-life Catholic physician
with ambitions - maybe delusions - of becoming a full-time writer. That qualifies
me as artistic, but I take a very dim view of government support of the arts.
Where public money goes, politics and government controls follow. If some
misanthropic moron wants to defecate on a creche or urinate on a mezuzah,
call it art and get some other cretins to pay to watch, I'll cut him the slack
and let him do it. (I'll resist, for the time being, the urge to punch the
jerk in the mouth and call that performance art.) Just don't let him do it
on my dime.
Roderick T. Beaman
Johnston