Mr. Young's rebuttal:

  * While it is true that in 1996 I received a $5000 grant from the Ohio Arts Council to write ONE OF THE GUYS, and while it is also true that the OAC receives some of its funding from the NEA, I strongly deny that my book is in any way pornographic or that the grant violated any OAC or NEA policies. True, the novel strongly satirizes the sexual practices of US sailors and marines in the Far East, but the purpose of the book is to expose these practices and institutional attitudes in order to ridicule them.

* The NEA provided 7.7% of the Ohio Arts Council's 1996 fiscal year budget. 7.7% of the $5000 grant I received is $385.50. That works out to one penny per every 7000 Americans.

* The scene that has generated the most controversy, wherein an underage Filipino girl pulls a string of razor blades from her vagina in a stage show to entertain U.S. sailors (p. 195), is an actual stage show that our servicemen often view in Manila, as well as in the notorious sex resort of Pattaya Beach, Thailand, where US Navy ships often anchor for recreational purposes (as opposed to strategic reasons). I strongly OPPOSE such "entertainment" and wrote about it to criticize this injustice against Asian child prostitutes. The Navy forbids personnel on overseas liberty from frequenting gay clubs, and will drum a sailor out of the service merely for being gay, yet the Navy does not forbid its personnel from frequenting clubs where child prostitution and other forms of exploitative "entertainment" occur. The American Family Association is not criticizing the US military for these practices, nor calling for a reduction in the military budget. Instead, they are attacking me for accepting a government grant to write a book exposing and criticizing these practices, and they are using that as an excuse to oppose government funding of the arts.

* The American Family Association's stance that my free speech should not be subsidized by the American taxpayer is hypocritical, since the AFA, as a nonprofit organization that pays no taxes, is in effect being subsidized by the taxpayer when it promotes its own views, which are not shared by a majority of Americans (e.g. the AFA's extreme right-wing positions on the right to choose, gun policy, gay rights, etc.).

The Charge:

*The National Endowment for the Arts has funded, by way of the Ohio Arts Council (OAC), a book by Robert Clark Young which describes a teenage girl removing razor blades from her reproductive area. Young, the book's author, received a $5,000 grant from the Ohio Arts Council. This grant was in turn a part of a larger 1996 grant of $963,000 to the OAC from the National Endowment of the Arts to write One of The Guys. In the book's Acknowledgments section the author praises an OAC Arts Council member for arguing, "This project was deserving of grant money." Other parts of the book describe a morbid scene in a sex video porn shop of a priest who has died in a peep show booth while engaging in anonymous sex with another male.

* "Even though this was a 1996 grant that paid for this garbage, there are no rules in place at the NEA to stop funding of a current similar project," stated Tim Wildmon, vice president of the American Family Association. Bill Ivey, the new NEA Chairman, in testimony before Congress recently stated, "We come before you today as a different agency, a new agency." Wildmon said, "This is nothing more than political hot air. At present the Senate is pushing for a multi-million dollar increase in funding in a conference committee and the liberal members of that committee will probably approve the increase. House Speaker Dennis Hastert holds the power to stop this increase since he is the power broker in the House."