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