Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 651

524US2

Unit: $U95

[09-06-00 18:40:44] PAGES PGT: OPIN

606

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR ARTS v. FINLEY

Souter, J., dissenting

straction from artistic viewpoint, and to quote from an opin-
ion just two years old: “In artistic . . . settings, indecency
may have strong communicative content, protesting conven-
tional norms or giving an edge to a work by conveying other-
wise inexpressible emotions. . . . Indecency often is insepara-
ble from the ideas and viewpoints conveyed, or separable
only with loss of truth or expressive power.” Denver Area
Ed. Telecommunications Consortium, Inc. v. FCC, 518 U. S.
727, 805 (1996) (Kennedy, J., joined by Ginsburg, J., concur-
ring) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted); see
also Cohen v. California, 403 U. S. 15, 26 (1971) (“[W]e
cannot indulge the facile assumption that one can forbid par-
ticular words without also running a substantial risk of
suppressing ideas in the process”).
“[T]he inextricability of
indecency from expression,” Denver Area Ed. Telecommuni-
cations Consortium, supra, at 805, is beyond dispute in a
certain amount of entirely lawful artistic enterprise. Starve
the mode, starve the message.

Just as self-evidently, a statute disfavoring speech that
fails to respect America’s “diverse beliefs and values” is the
very model of viewpoint discrimination; it penalizes any view
disrespectful to any belief or value espoused by someone in
the American populace. Boiled down to its practical es-
sence, the limitation obviously means that art that disre-
spects the ideology, opinions, or convictions of a signiﬁcant
segment of the American public is to be disfavored, whereas
art that reinforces those values is not. After all, the whole
point of the proviso was to make sure that works like Ser-
rano’s ostensibly blasphemous portrayal of Jesus would not
be funded, see supra, at 603, while a reverent treatment,
conventionally respectful of Christian sensibilities, would not
run afoul of the law. Nothing could be more viewpoint
based than that. Cf. Rosenberger, 515 U. S., at 831 (a stat-
ute targeting a “prohibited perspective, not the general sub-
ject matter” of religion is viewpoint based); United States v.
Eichman, 496 U. S. 310, 317 (1990) (striking down anti-ﬂag-