It's shocking enough to hear that protestors are picketing the Loveland Museum over an allegedly pornographic depiction of Jesus. But what's even more disturbing is reading in Sunday's Coloradoan that Bill Donohue and the Catholic League have inserted themselves into the controversy.

According to the Coloradoan, Donohue contacted Governor Ritter and claimed that the Loveland exhibit was supported by state funding. "We have thousands of members in Colorado, and they would surely like to know why their taxes are funding anti-Christian hate speech", Donohue wrote.

Bill Donohue is known for his extremist views. Just three days ago he defended priests who have sexually abused children. Donohue claimed that such incidents aren't that bad (see the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights [01-Oct-10], "Not all sexual abuse is equal" [press release], online at www.catholicleague.org). I really don't understand why Donohue thinks he has any standing to challenge the morality of an art exhibit in Northern Colorado. Regardless, the Loveland Museum says that no state funds were used to finance the exhibit.

Given all the excitement, I wanted to see what the fuss was about.

Yesterday afternoon I drove the ten miles to Loveland, where, indeed, I saw protestors lining both sides of Lincoln Avenue in front of the Loveland Museum. The protestors challenging the exhibit were on the west side of the street, and those defending free speech were on the east side. Altogether it was a pretty casual protest, comprised of families with their kids, as you can see in the photos below.

The exhibit itself featured ten artists, all of whose work the Master Printer Bud Shark had helped to create. Bud Shark's studio is located in Lyons, Colorado, and the exhibit had previously been shown in 2009 at MCA Denver.

I particularly liked seeing Don Ed Hardy's work for the first time. Hardy is famous for popularizing tribal and Japanese tattooing – a phenomenon that practically defines 80s and 90s alternative culture. And in fact, the exhibited Hardy prints mashed together images from Japanese and traditional tattoos.

Walking through the gallery, I overheard people asking each other where the controversy was. As it turns out, the contested image by Enrique Chagoya is a 7"×7" panel, which is part of a larger, 12-panel work. The image itself is small, non-pornographic and not offensive. I saw it and wondered about the mental gymnastics that someone's brain had to perform, in order to conceive of the image as pornography and hate-speech. The controversy evaporated instantly when I saw the art. (Which is not to say that some of the other exhibited prints by Enrique Chagoya aren't pretty confrontational in their use of loaded imagery... but under the circumstances, I'll let someone else tell you about that – Or you can go check out the Chagoya prints for yourself.)