AUSTIN, TX — When 54-year-old Robert Hurt isn’t busy raising cattle or siring his 14 children, he’s apparently busy fretting about all the boobs in the nation’s capital – and he doesn’t mean the elected officials. So concerned is the Kerrville, TX rancher and Republican party delegate about statues such as the infamous Spirit of Justice in the Justice Department’s Great Hall – not to mention the bare breasted women who decorate the Dupont Circle fountain – that he has proposed that the Texas GOP add a plank about artistic decency to its state platform.
“You don’t have nude art on your front porch,” the Dallas Morning News quotes the art opinionated delegate as insisting. “So, why is it important to have that in the common places of Washington, D.C.?”
According to the Washington Post, Hurt explained via telephone that when he visited DC a decade ago while attending a Promise Keepers gathering on the Mall, he was horrified to see semi and fully unclothed statues on display at the National Gallery.
“I found it very inappropriate,” he insisted.
When he learned years later that the Arlington Memorial Bridge is polluted by the bare-chested statues depicting Valor and Sacrifice, the frequently copulating father was infuriated by the pictures it brought to his mind.
“The Lady Godiva thing – that’s what it conjured up,” he confessed. “And that’s not what our country’s about.”
Hurt soon learned that responding to complaints about nude statues of historic value is also something that our country is apparently not about.
“I believe art affects a country indirectly,” he opined to the Post. “I have been studying the decline of morals in this country. It’s sending the wrong message to children that nudity is fine, that nakedness is fine… There are degrees of vulgarity, and it opens up the door for the other stuff.”
Fortunately for good sense, the Texas GOP declined the opportunity to look even more oppressive and pig-ignorant than many already believe it to be, by refusing to adopt the plank – or expend the 22nd Amendment concerning presidential term limits to spouses.
Nonetheless, Hurt assures the world of politics and art that he’s not finished. In fact, he may need to return to Washington D.C. to expose himself to more naked and topless statuary – this time with a videocamera. “I’m not going to stop until I succeed. I’m prepared for a long fight.”
For those curious about how long the children of America have suffered from the nudity of statues such as the Spirit of Justice, that particular piece was commissioned in 1933 and cost $7,000. Unlike most representations of Justice, the C. Paul Jennewein cast aluminum piece depicts the elemental sans blindfold. It is not uncommon for her to be depicted with one breast exposed by her toga-like garment.
