So that creates a vacuum, which government tends to fill. But some insist the NEA is anti-Christian. Heritage Foundation adjunct scholar Laurence Jarvik, who is Jewish, says he attended NEA council meetings in which conservative Christians were demeaned. They have a very rigid world-view. They're not open-minded.
Opponents say they find nothing in the U.S. Constitution that requires taxpayers to finance artists.
Many NEA critics conclude that the agency cannot be reformed. Congress passed a law in 1989 that withheld funding from pornographic projects, but a federal court later struck it down as an infringement of the free-speech rights of artists. Yet all the other government agencies have guidelines which they must go by.