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NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR ARTS v. FINLEY

Souter, J., dissenting

congressional choice to sustain freedom of expression, Ro-
senberger teaches that the First Amendment forbids deci-
sions based on viewpoint popularity. So long as Congress
chooses to subsidize expressive endeavors at large, it has no
business requiring the NEA to turn down funding applica-
tions of artists and exhibitors who devote their “freedom of
thought, imagination, and inquiry” to defying our tastes, our
beliefs, or our values.
It may not use the NEA’s purse to
“suppres[s] . . . dangerous ideas.” Regan v. Taxation with
Representation of Wash., supra, at 548 (internal quotation
marks omitted).

The Court says otherwise, claiming to distinguish Rosen-
berger on the ground that the student activities funds in that
case were generally available to most applicants, whereas
NEA funds are disbursed selectively and competitively to a
choice few. Ante, at 586. But the Court in Rosenberger
anticipated and speciﬁcally rejected just this distinction
when it held in no uncertain terms that “[t]he government
justify viewpoint discrimination among private
cannot
515 U. S., at 835.8
speakers on the economic fact of scarcity.”
Scarce money demands choices, of course, but choices “on
some acceptable [viewpoint] neutral principle,” like artistic
excellence and artistic merit; 9 “nothing in our decision[s] in-

8 The Court’s attempt to avoid Rosenberger by describing NEA funding
in terms of competition, not scarcity, will not work. Competition implies
scarcity, without which there is no exclusive prize to compete for; the
Court’s “competition” is merely a surrogate for “scarcity.”

9 While criteria of “artistic excellence and artistic merit” may raise in-
tractable issues about the identiﬁcation of artistic worth, and could no
doubt be used covertly to ﬁlter out unwanted ideas, there is nothing inher-
ently viewpoint discriminatory about such merit-based criteria. We have
noted before that an esthetic government goal is perfectly legitimate.
See Metromedia, Inc. v. San Diego, 453 U. S. 490, 507–508 (1981) (plurality
opinion). Decency and respect, on the other hand, are inherently and fa-
cially viewpoint based, and serve no legitimate and permissible end. The
Court’s assertion that the mere fact that grants must be awarded accord-
ing to artistic merit precludes “absolute neutrality” on the part of the