Here's a response published in the Sac Bee
Letters to the editor
Published 2:15 am PDT Monday, April 26, 2004

Art censorship

Re "His art's too racy for walls at CalSTRS," April 16: Memories of past civil rights abuses are short in some people's minds. Censorship often can be justified when it conflicts with a person's self-interest, in this case a distorted view of feminism. CalSTRS spokeswoman Kirsten Macintyre either had such a memory lapse, or suffers from selective amnesia.

 Claiming to speak for six offended female employees, she rationalized the removal of four paintings by Kenney Mencher from CalSTRS' walls as offensive to those women. "We have a zero-tolerance policy for harassment in the workplace," Macintyre stated, forgetting that the First Amendment allows for no exceptions to the freedom of speech clause.

 And since when did the "objectification of women" (her words) become the equivalent of harassment? Men looking at women in a painting, not men groping women in the office. Has the spokesperson, a woman herself, forgotten the hard-fought gains made on her behalf by civil rights advocates, women and men, who insisted that the workplace be gender-neutral?

- Emil Bernstein, Sacramento