ABSTRACT
A self-identified moral and religious man, President Bush stood by while moral and religious taxpayers were forced to subsidize immoral and irreligious "art". White House Chief of Staff Sam Skinner was reportedly outraged by the latest controversy, the NEA-backed publication Queer City, which ran a poem depicting Jesus Christ as a pedophile. After all, the president sat mute for three years as NEA grants underwrote an exhibition with a crucifix submerged in urine, a photo of a man posing with a bull-whip up his anus, a woman smearing herself with chocolate and putting vegetables up her vagina, a man wandering around stage urinating and simulating masturbation, and so on. The administration undoubtedly assumed that firing Frohnmayer would make the NEA issue go away. But the president's welcome moment of political expediency cannot make up for three years of complicity in the NEA's support for the bizarre and the obscene.
