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Cite as: 524 U. S. 569 (1998)

611

Souter, J., dissenting

point discrimination: if the Food and Drug Administration
launches an advertising campaign on the subject of smoking,
it may condemn the habit without also having to show a cow-
boy taking a puff on the opposite page; 4 and if the Secretary
of Defense wishes to buy a portrait to decorate the Pentagon,
he is free to prefer George Washington over George the
Third.5

The Government freely admits, however, that it neither
speaks through the expression subsidized by the NEA,6 nor
buys anything for itself with its NEA grants. On the con-
trary, believing that “[t]he arts . . . reﬂect the high place
accorded by the American people to the nation’s rich cultural
heritage,” § 951(6), and that “[i]t is vital to a democracy . . .
to provide ﬁnancial assistance to its artists and the organiza-
tions that support their work,” § 951(10), the Government
acts as a patron, ﬁnancially underwriting the production
of art by private artists and impresarios for independent
consumption. Accordingly, the Government would have
us liberate government-as-patron from First Amendment
strictures not by placing it squarely within the cate-
gories of government-as-buyer or government-as-speaker,

4 See Rust v. Sullivan, 500 U. S. 173, 194 (1991) (“When Congress estab-
lished a National Endowment for Democracy to encourage other countries
to adopt democratic principles, 22 U. S. C. § 4411(b), it was not constitution-
ally required to fund a program to encourage competing lines of political
philosophy such as communism and fascism”).

5 On proposing the Public Works Art Project (PWAP), the New Deal
program that hired artists to decorate public buildings, President Roose-
velt allegedly remarked: “I can’t have a lot of young enthusiasts painting
Lenin’s head on the Justice Building.” Quoted in Mankin, Federal Arts
Patronage in the New Deal, in America’s Commitment to Culture: Govern-
ment and the Arts 77 (K. Mulcahy & M. Wyszomirski eds. 1995). He was
buying, and was free to take his choice.

6 Here, the “communicative element inherent in the very act of funding
itself,” Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of Univ. of Va., 515 U. S. 819,
892–893, n. 11 (1995) (Souter, J., dissenting), is an endorsement of the
importance of the arts collectively, not an endorsement of the individual
message espoused in a given work of art.