Though the original source of outrage on the Right seems to be the horrifying revelation that gay people sometimes make art, the final straw was this hideous desecration:
Clearly, something even more dastardly than wishing someone a "Happy Holidays".
At any rate, the issue at hand is that ants...yes, ants....are crawling on a crucifix. From Democracy in America:
But getting back to the ants: it's not really clear how they are supposed to be offensive. With the "Piss Christ" thing, there was at least an immature logic to the sense of offence. Children naturally take "peepee on your head" as an insult, and not everyone was going to think, "Okay, the swirling yellow sky effect recalls Rembrandt, the scatological joke of the medium defamiliarises the image and then leaves you thinking about the paradoxical idea of God as a flesh-and-blood being or, by extension, the strangeness of our own conscious and spiritual presence in these yucky material bodies". But ants? Who's offended by ants? The whole story has the feel of a troupe of political mummers donning their vestments and going through the motions, engaging in formalistic rituals of protest whose long-ago meanings they no longer feel or understand.
I'm actually hopeful that this may be among the last of these silly culture-war pantomimes we see for a while. The Smithsonian has taken a lot of flack for pulling "A Fire in My Belly", but I can at least imagine the relief with which a top administrator of the "Hide/Seek" show, waiting for the inevitable conservative assault, might have greeted Mr Boehner's letter: "They're going after the ants? That's it? They don't mind that we're doing a show that frankly addresses the gay identity of a substantial portion of the greatest names in American arts for the past 150 years? Fine, pull the ants!" I may be wrong, but it looks to me like the main takeaway here is that on the issue of the "homosexual lifestyle", cultural conservatives no longer have any fire in their belly.
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