A Cautionary Tale for Governor DeSantis

It looks like a new lawsuit from Disney is upping the ante in the company’s feud with Governor DeSantis. It alleges a “targeted campaign of government retaliation” undertaken by Mr. DeSantis after the company spoke up against a Florida law on what young children learn about sex at school. We’re a newspaper, not a lawyer, but our advice would be for Mr. DeSantis to go back and study the showdown between Mayor Giuliani and the Brooklyn Museum.That was a battle over “The Holy Virgin Mary,” a painting, by Chris Ofili, that is better known as the elephant-dung-spattered Madonna. It depicts the mother of Christ dotted with pieces of elephant dung and decorated with cutouts of pictures from off-color magazines of women’s private parts. Mr. Giuliani reacted by halting payments by the city to the museum and trying to evict the institution, only to get humiliated in court by a left-wing judge. The museum contended that its First Amendment rights had been violated. We sided with Mr. Giuliani and the taxpayers of New York, despite our admiration for Floyd Abrams, the museum’s lawyer. “The court ruled in our favor — very strongly,” is how Mr. Abrams described the outcome. Mr. Giuliani called the judge, Nina Gershon, “totally biased,” even “out of control,” and “part of the politically correct, left-wing ideology of New York City.”Mr. Giuliani saw the picture as a form of “Catholic-bashing” and said the museum had no right to a “subsidy to desecrate someone else’s religion.” No less a sage than John Cardinal O’Connor asked whether “it is not an attack on religion itself and, in a special way, on the Catholic Church.” The Bishop of Brooklyn deemed it understandable that all Christians would find “a painting of the Blessed Mother splattered with elephant dung offensive.”Yet the painting was catnip for the left. The Times hailed the “courage” of the museum’s director, Arnold Lehman, for showing the work. “Mr. Ofili is playing with the ideas of blasphemy and worship, race and religion,” the Times’ critic wrote, and “toying in a gently ironic way with the space between public outrage and private expression” to make a “spiritual statement.” The picture was “insubstantial,” the Times blathered, yet “also witty.” The Museum of Modern Art, in a kind of benediction, went on to acquire the painting. When a curator, Laura Hoptman, “put it in front of our committee, it looked like it had descended from Heaven,” she crooned to the New Yorker. The Madonna’s breast, “a lump of lacquered elephant dung,” the New Yorker noted, has “an effect that is earthy and beautiful.” Ms. Hoptman concluded: “There’s so much joy in this work, and humor and love.”Judge Gershon found that New York City’s campaign against the painting failed to pass constitutional muster. “There is no federal constitutional issue more grave,” she said, “than the effort by government officials to censor works of expression.” She balked at what she saw as Mr. Giuliani’s attempt to “threaten the vitality” of a “cultural institution as punishment for failing to abide by governmental demands for orthodoxy.”Mr. Giuliani vowed to appeal, but soon settled, not only yielding on all fronts relating to the exhibition of the dung-splattered painting, but also agreeing to extend permanently the city’s annual subsidy to the museum. The city even agreed to throw in an extra $5.8 million, CNN reported, “for physical improvements to the museum’s building.” The left laughed at poor Catholic New Yorkers being forced to pay for what they saw as blasphemy.Which brings us back to Mr. DeSantis and Disney. The Times observes that Disney “has proved a wily political foil for Mr. DeSantis.” The company says that its First Amendment right to expression is under siege. “In America, the government cannot punish you for speaking your mind,” Disney says, echoing the Brooklyn Museum’s case against Mr. Giuliani. It’s a cautionary tale for conservatives trying to wage the culture war in liberal courts.

A Cautionary Tale for Governor DeSantis

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