Many of you may be too young to remember, but back in 1989 a exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe featuring Andres Serrano’s work contained a picture of Jesus hanging from a cross submerged in a jar of urine. Mapplethorpe own work had pictures of gay sex acts and nude young boys.

It was underwritten with your money by the National Endowments for the Arts, (NEA). At that time, house democrats took the position it was “freedom of expression,” and were outraged when republicans moved to halt the funding.

Here we go again.

Talk about a stimulus package.

The National Endowment for the Arts may be spending some of the money it received from the Recovery and Reinvestment Act to fund nude simulated-sex dances, Saturday night “pervert” revues and the airing of pornographic horror films at art houses in San Francisco.

The NEA was given $80 million of the government’s $787 billion economic stimulus bill to spread around to needy artists nationwide, and most of the money is being spent to help preserve jobs in museums, orchestras, theaters and dance troupes that have been hit hard by the recession.

But some of the NEA’s grants are spicing up more than the economy. A few of their more risque choices have some taxpayer advocates hot under the collar, including a $50,000 infusion for the Frameline film house, which recently screened Thundercrack, “the world’s only underground kinky art porno horror film, complete with four men, three women and a gorilla.”

“When you spend so much money in a short amount of time … you’re going to have nonsense like this, and that’s why the stimulus should never have been done in the first place,” said David Williams, vice president for policy at Citizens Against Government Waste. [more here]

Nonsense? Naw, we’d call it bullshit.

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