Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 27, 1990 TAG: 9005290206
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Like many such crusaders, he and his supporters have displayed a tendency to oversimplify complex issues, and - worse - an urge to suppress. It's one thing to offer criticism of a picture or film or publication; it's another to seek to make it unavailable for others to see or hear or read.
So when an adversary turns things around and seeks to suppress Wildmon - and, making the irony even more delicious, tries to do so partly on the grounds that Wildmon in effect is a purveyor of pornography - there may be a temptation to applaud.
The temptation should be resisted.
To protest how the National Endowment for the Arts spends public money, Wildmon recently sent 180,000 pamphlets to members of Congress, the clergy and the news media. To illustrate his point, he included blow-ups of portions of works by artist David Wojnarowicz. Some of the images are sexual; one depicts Christ with a hypodermic needle in his arm. Wildmon called it "extremely offensive material."
Wojnarowicz has fought back with a lawsuit (a) claiming violation of New York copyright law and (b) asking for $1 million in libel damages from Wildmon for reducing Wojnarowicz's art to pornography.
As for the latter charge, Wojnarowicz may have a point, at least in legal theory. Under the test for what's obscene as laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court, a work must be considered in its totality. It's conceivable that Wildmon, by removing "extremely offensive material" from its context, magically transformed non-obscenity into obscenity.
But that possibility only illustrates the ultimate absurdity of anti-obscenity legal theory, and the futility of the courts' attempt to square anti-obscenity laws with the First Amendment.
In real life, Wildmon of course is not a purveyor of pornography, nor has he turned turned Wojnarowicz's art into pornography. Wildmon has said he doesn't like Wojnarowicz's work, and he doesn't like public funding for it. That's lobbying, not libel.
Similarly, the proper use of copyright law is to protect artists and authors from predators who would steal their work for illicit profits. It is not to override First Amendment guarantees of free and vigorous political discourse.
Wojnarowicz presumably would agree that Wildmon-like thinking is wrong in its yen for suppressing ideas because they may be offensive to some. But that hardly makes it right to suppress ideas because they are Wildmon's.
by CNB