606
Souter, J., dissenting
straction from artistic viewpoint, and to quote from an opinion just two years old: "In artistic . . . settings, indecency may have strong communicative content, protesting conventional norms or giving an edge to a work by conveying otherwise inexpressible emotions. . . . Indecency often is inseparable 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., concurring) (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 particular words without also running a substantial risk of suppressing ideas in the process"). "[T]he inextricability of indecency from expression," Denver Area Ed. Telecommunications 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 essence, the limitation obviously means that art that disrespects 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 Serrano'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 statute targeting a "prohibited perspective, not the general subject matter" of religion is viewpoint based); United States v. Eichman, 496 U. S. 310, 317 (1990) (striking down anti-flag-
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