OPINION:
A federal judge is poised to issue a ruling any day now about the fate of a controversial piece of art in the U.S. Capitol that shows a policeman as a pig — and the fact that this even has to go to court shows not just the power, but the utter ridiculousness, of the progressive movement in America, circa 2017.
Congress should not be in the business of promoting the idea that police are pigs.
The private sector? Fine and dandy — paint all the police-as-pigs pictures you want. Display them over fireplaces and on household walls the nation over — that’s a personal right, an individual choice, a market-based OK.
But hanging one inside the nation’s halls of powers, the very ones where tourists tread and where taxpayers pay?
No. Sorry, David Pulpous. Your acrylic art creation, called “Untitled #1” and selected by Rep. William Lacy Clay, Missouri Democrat, as proper Capitol display, is inappropriate.
Perhaps if it was historically accurate, then a case could be made for its stay. But the painting depicts a pig in a police uniform pointing a gun at a black wolf. The wolf is holding a sign that says, “STOP KILL.” And above are two birds, one white, the other black, engaged in a fight. Alongside is a black protester, scale of justice in hand, being crucified.
Law enforcement groups have called that painting “repugnant” and “repulsive.” And it is that.
It’s also a political statement — a skewed political vision that tails off the Ferguson, Missouri, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” movement that grew out of the police shooting of black 18-year-old Michael Brown. The shooting by while officer Darren Wilson of Brown was found in two separate investigations by both local and federal authorities — feds under the watchful eyes of Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder, no less — to be self-defense.
Yet black America, fueled by radical leftists from the progressive-socialist-anarchist elements of society, ran with the whole “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” mantra to the point of actually believing, in some cases, it seems, that Wilson purposely targeted Brown for the Crime of Being Black. From there, America then suffered the Black Lives Matter violence — which continues, to this day, in the form of protests against President Donald Trump.
So here we are, arguing over a painting that in saner times — in safer times — wouldn’t make it within 100 feet of the U.S. Capitol.
Republicans in Congress have taken the painting off the wall on a couple different occasions. Democrats have fought against what they say is censorship, and put it back up. Clay ultimately filed a lawsuit over its removal, saying he has a constitutional right for free expression.
Well, on that count, so don’t Republicans, who removed the painting. So don’t police, who say it paints them in a terrible and untrue light and it shouldn’t be used in the Capitol to serve some partisan interest. And so do taxpayers who pay Clay’s salary, and may not want this sole Democrat to be able to abuse his congressional power to further a political agenda that’s nothing more than false narrative.
The court should issue a speedy ruling, a blunt ruling, and it should make clear that hit-piece political paintings parading and masquerading as art — or worse, as accurate artistic expressions of historical events — have no place in U.S. Capitol walls. If Clay wants to hang the painting in his private home, so be it.
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