The boundary line moved

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Our commentary today contains subject matter that is likely not suitable for younger listeners. So we’ll let the music roll for several seconds to give you the opportunity to hit pause on this and come back to it.

Up next, The Mapplethorpe Trial, 35 years ago.

AUDIO: Now, Cincinnati’s News 5 Tonight: Good evening, the eyes of the nation are focused on Cincinnati tonight in what is one of the most important and controversial legal issues ever to face this town. 

WORLD commentator Maria Baer revisits the case—and what the passage of time has changed.

MARIA BAER: Robert Mapplethorpe had died the year before his controversial exhibit opened in Cincinnati: complications from AIDS.

But posthumously he was still a rising star in the art world. His exhibit included photos that were by any reasonable measure child pornography. It 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. They contacted local authorities, and a grand jury soon indicted the Contemporary Arts Center and its director, Dennis Barrie, for obscenity.

But the show, as they say, went on—the exhibit opened and drew the largest crowd of visitors the museum ever saw. Art critics all over the country rushed to praise the photos as a bold stance against “censorship.” A jury later acquitted Barrie and the museum.

The case became a famous one, and it remains a case study in legal textbooks.

REPORTER: “Art on trial, art on trial” Art on trial … that’s what the 200 protesters outside the courthouse…

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. A Smithsonian Magazine 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 proudly exhibiting child porn today.

It’s even hard to imagine that any major media or art critics would gamble their Right-Kind-of-Person reputations by defending sexual abuse as “art.”

AUDIO: This week we have a story from our senior producer Evan Chan. It’s about a fight over censorship and free expression. But I am going to warn you that this episode includes extremely graphic sexual content. So…

That’s a 2023 podcast episode about the Mapplethorpe case from Slate Magazine. Note: the warning is merely about hearing a description of the photos. Slate’s a progressive bastion of the media. The irony is almost poetic.

AUDIO: “My mother was in the kind of punk rock scene at that time. I’d just go to artists’ studios and they lived in their studios and it was rough.” / There’s one moment he’ll never forget, when he was about 5 years old. / “I, I remember my mom saying Robert was going to come over and take some pictures of me.”

It’s difficult to say exactly how this happened—that our cultural acceptance went backwards, at least on this one very narrow category.

Maybe it was the years of steadfast advocacy against obscenity by Christians.

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.

This is, unambiguously, positive.

No one seriously thought Mapplethorpe's photos were beautiful; they thought they were just edgy. But edginess is a pathetic substitute for moral reasoning, and as a guiding principle it will lead people into the most irrational places.

Today, that’s no longer the local art museum. It’s 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 of “becoming” another sex. 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 some call it “medicine.” And yet it remains what it has always been: 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 civilization. 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.

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, now fighting to protect families and kids from gender ideology.

They’re called the Center for Christian Virtue and they're led by my husband, Aaron. And I couldn’t be more proud, or more sure that in any fight, the side that’s fighting to protect kids is the one every Christian is called to be on.

For WORLD, I’m Maria Baer.

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