From “edgy” to abuse

Thirty-five years ago, a small Cincinnati art museum opened a photography exhibit its curators called “edgy.” It was a collection of photos from Robert Mapplethorpe, already known for homoerotic imagery. In this case, his photos were child pornography. The exhibit included two naked photographs of very young children, as well as multiple close-up photos of violent homosexual acts.

A local group of Christians mounted a public campaign against the exhibit. They contacted local authorities, and a grand jury soon indicted the Contemporary Arts Center and its director, Dennis Barrie, on obscenity charges. But the show, as they say, went on—the exhibit opened nonetheless, and drew the largest crowd of visitors the museum ever saw. Art critics all over the country, alerted to the situation by the controversy, rushed to praise the photos. A jury later acquitted Barrie and the museum on the obscenity charges.

The case became a famous one, and it remains a case study in legal textbooks. It is usually framed as a First Amendment story; a test of the boundary line between ‘free expression’ and the right of a few killjoys not to be shocked. Smithsonian Magazine’s 2015 retrospective on the case was headlined “When Art Fought the Law and Art Won.”

In a fascinating twist, that framing has aged badly.

It is almost impossible to imagine any museum, regardless of how strong its fidelity to edginess, proudly exhibiting child porn today. It’s even harder to imagine that any major media or art critics would gamble their reputations by defending sexual abuse as “art,” or casting the criminal behind the lens as anything other than a deranged predator. The 2023 podcast episode about the Mapplethorpe case from Slate—a progressive bastion of the media—includes a trigger warning for its verbal description of the photos. The irony is almost poetic.

It’s difficult to say exactly how this happened—that our cultural acceptance went backwards, at least on this one very narrow category of sexualized photographs of children. Maybe it was the years of steadfast advocacy against obscenity by Christians and the Moral Majority. Or maybe cultural tastes have simply changed, and the #MeToo movement in particular—despite its excesses—made sexual abuse uncool again. Whatever the cause, it is fascinating to observe that viewing the 1990 Mapplethorpe case through a 2026 lens offers a strange and exceedingly rare example of culture returning to a more rational view of obscenity.

Without question, this is a positive development. The objectification, sexualization, and predation of children’s bodies is fundamentally evil, and evil is fundamentally disgusting. It is not art. Maybe it is “edgy” to pretend that it is; and that’s what you read in all the glowing reviews of Mapplethorpe at the time—people didn’t think his photos were beautiful, they thought they were edgy. But edginess is a pathetic substitute for moral reasoning, and as a guiding principle it will lead people into the most irrational, embarrassing places.

Today, that’s no longer the local art museum. It’s down the street, inside the local children’s hospital.

Since 2015 or so, more than 60 so-called “gender clinics” have opened across our country, seducing troubled children and their terrified parents into poisoning and mutilating their bodies under the pretense that they can ‘become’ another sex (and thereby ‘feel better.’) This is another side of Mapplethorpe’s coin. It is, once again, the objectification, sexualization, and predation of children’s bodies. We don’t call it “art” but we do call it “medicine.” And yet it remains what it has always been, and that is evil.

Christians should hope that in 35 years, we view this moment the same way we now view Mapplethorpe’s photos: as a horrible, grotesque blight on our history as a society. The Mapplethorpe case 35 years later is a reminder that cultural winds change, and that we would do well to heed the Proverbs and Paul and refuse to let them blow us about.

Solomon wrote “the simple believes everything, but the prudent gives thought to his steps” (Proverbs 14:15). “Do not be conformed to this world,” said Paul, “but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2). It is much better to decide whether something is good, whether it is true, whether it is commendable and honorable and worthy of praise based on … whether it is true and good and beautiful; rather than whether the “wrong kind of people hate it” and the cool kids say it’s “art.” Real beauty speaks for itself. Ugliness needs champions, and we should never be one.

Most of all, though, children will always be the very beloved of God, and the most needful of our protection and care. Today, the same organization of local Ohio citizens that led the charge against Mapplethorpe has grown into a statewide force, fighting to protect kids from gender ideology. They’re the Center for Christian Virtue, led by my husband, Aaron. And I couldn’t be more proud or more certain that in any fight, the side that’s fighting to protect kids is the one I want to be on.