Cite as: 524 U. S. 569 (1998)
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 cowboy 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 contrary, 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 organizations 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 categories of government-as-buyer or government-as-speaker,
4 See Rust v. Sullivan, 500 U. S. 173, 194 (1991) ("When Congress established a National Endowment for Democracy to encourage other countries to adopt democratic principles, 22 U. S. C. § 4411(b), it was not constitutionally 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 Roosevelt 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: Government 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.
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