Cite as: 524 U. S. 569 (1998)
Souter, J., dissenting
IV
Although I, like the Court, recognize that "facial challenges to legislation are generally disfavored," FW/PBS, Inc. v. Dallas, 493 U. S. 215, 223 (1990), the proviso is the type of statute that most obviously lends itself to such an attack. The NEA does not offer a list of reasons when it denies a grant application, and an artist or exhibitor whose subject raises a hint of controversy can never know for sure whether the decency and respect criteria played a part in any decision by the NEA to deny funding. Hence, the most that we could hope for in waiting for an as-applied challenge would be (a) a plaintiff whose rejected proposal raised some risk of offense and was not aimed at exhibition in a forum in which decency and respect might serve as permissible selection criteria, or (b) a plaintiff who sought funding for a project that had been sanitized to avoid rejection. But no one has denied here that the institutional plaintiff, the National Association of Artists' Organizations (NAAO), has representative standing on behalf of some such potential plaintiffs. See App. 21-25 (declaration of NAAO's Executive Director, listing examples of the potentially objectionable works produced by several member organizations). We would therefore gain nothing at all by dismissing this case and requiring those individuals or groups to bring essentially the same suit, restyled as an as-applied challenge raising one of the possibilities just mentioned.
In entertaining this challenge, the Court finds § 954(d)(1) constitutional on its face in part because there are "a number of indisputably constitutional applications" for both the "decency" and the "respect" criteria, ante, at 584, and it is hard to imagine "how 'decency' or 'respect' would bear on grant applications in categories such as funding for symphony orchestras," ante, at 583. There are circumstances in which we have rejected facial challenges for similar reasons. "A facial challenge to a legislative Act is, of course, the most difficult challenge to mount successfully, since the challenger
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