A federal court in Rhode Island ruled on Friday that a new National Endowment for the Arts policy of reviewing grant applicants to see if they comply with President Trump’s executive order on “gender ideology” violated the Constitution and could not be implemented.
The lawsuit was filed in March by several arts organizations, including Rhode Island Latino Arts, which promotes art made by Latinos, and National Queer Theater, a New York company. It challenged new agency regulations, initially introduced in February, stating that federal funds “shall not be used to promote gender ideology,” which Mr. Trump’s order said includes “the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.”
In the lawsuit, the groups, which said they had all produced or supported work about transgender and nonbinary people, argued that they would effectively be barred from seeking grants “on artistic merit and excellence grounds,” which violated their rights under the First Amendment. The suit was supported by the American Civil Liberties Union.
In the ruling, Judge William E. Smith, a senior district judge who was appointed by President George W. Bush, noted that the 1965 law creating the endowment had included provisions ensuring that all grants be awarded, as the court put it, “on talent alone, irrespective of the artists’ viewpoints or the messages conveyed in their works.” The new regulations, he said, ran afoul of that goal.
After the lawsuit was filed, the arts endowment issued a “final notice” altering the way compliance with the “gender ideology” order would be evaluated. Its new procedure called for the chair of the endowment to review grant applications on a “case-by-case” basis “for artistic excellence and merit, including whether the proposed project promotes gender ideology.”
The endowment said that it would not turn down applicants solely based on whether a project “promotes gender ideology.” But in its ruling, the Rhode Island court said that the new procedure still violated the First Amendment.
“With the Final Notice in effect, projects deemed to promote gender ideology are less likely to be approved for N.E.A. funding,” it said. “The Final Notice is thus a restriction on artists’ speech, and one that is viewpoint based, because it assigns negative weight to the expression of certain ideas on the issue of gender identity.”
Lynette Labinger, a cooperating attorney for the A.C.L.U. of Rhode Island, said that the court had “resoundingly affirmed” the plaintiff’s argument about the purpose behind the laws creating the N.E.A.’s granting process: to promote artistic excellence in the private sector, not to promote government speech.
If the agency’s arguments had prevailed, she said, it “would have transformed these programs into a ratification of whatever the government message wants to be.”
The arts endowment did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Jennifer Schuessler is a reporter for the Culture section of The Times who covers intellectual life and the world of ideas.
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