(WASHINGTON TIMES) -- When social conservatives were fighting to stop funding the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1990s, Rick Santorum was in Congress voting to preserve taxpayer funding — pitting him against many of the high-profile culture warriors with whom he is now most identified.
NEA funding became a hot-button issue during the first President Bush’s term and on into the Clinton years, featuring prominently in that decade’s spending battles, as both fiscal and social conservatives argued against taxpayers subsidizing such art as the infamous “Piss Christ” photograph.
But Mr. Santorum, who served two terms in the House and another two terms in the Senate and is now running as a family values conservative for the Republican presidential nomination, voted more than a half-dozen times to protect the funding.