The image of a red, white and blue United States map swirling around a water closet didn’t sit well with Sacramento protesters last week. But the Anti-Defamation League was flushed by a different work of art.
The “A Creative Merger” exhibit in the Department of Justice building in Sacramento drew the ire of some perturbed by the potty painting: “T’anks to Mr. Bush.”
That piece was one of many painted by California lawyers in an exhibit co-sponsored by the California Arts Council, a taxpayer-supported state agency.
A gathering Thursday, July 28, organized by the advocacy group Move America Forward with protesters wielding “pro-American” art, was met by an ACLU-sponsored group in the state capital for a pair of rallies that, according to one bystander, devolved into “competing chants on the Iraq war.”
But the ADL had its mind on subjects other than the toilet.
Jonathan Bernstein, the ADL’s regional director, is more concerned about a painting by San Francisco’s Juan R. Fuentes depicting a kaffiyeh-wearing man behind a Star of David formed from barbed wire and the caption “Stop U.S. Financed Genocide in the Middle East.”
Unlike demonstrators, Bernstein has no desire for the artwork to be removed prior to the exhibition’s Aug. 30 closing. But he’d appreciate if Attorney General Bill Lockyer, whose office is in the Justice Department, weighed in on the piece.
“We do not ask you to censor or remove the art. We ask you simply to speak,” reads a July 29 letter to the attorney general from Bernstein, Amanda Susskind, the director of the ADL’s Pacific Southwest region and Morris Casuto, director of the San Diego/Imperial County region.
“A simple statement that your endorsement of the exhibit and your ardent support for free speech should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the message contained in the offensive piece would go a long way to counteracting the affront.”
Yet Lockyer’s spokesman Tom Dresslar — a very busy man of late — said that Lockyer’s position on the issue was very clear.
“Not only has Lockyer fought strongly against anti-Semitism as well as other forms of discrimination, he’s also been a staunch supporter of the state of Israel throughout his career,” said Dresslar.
“So, yeah, the attorney general doesn’t endorse anti-Semitism. In fact, he opposes it strongly.”
The issue at question, Dresslar implored, is freedom of speech.
Lockyer, he said, isn’t a huge fan of many of the exhibit’s pieces, but he’s happy to have them in his office. And he’d be happy to have a few more “works of art” as well.
“Just to give you a flavor of the attorney general’s First Amendment commitment: There were people here who put together art [during the rally] and one had Lockyer being flushed down a toilet, another compared him to al-Qaida and one with him wearing a Mickey Mouse hat saying ‘I Love Gerbils,'” noted Dresslar.