The Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2006 0162-895X © 2006 The Policy Studies Journal Published by Blackwell Publishing. Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ. 131 131 Public Spending on the Arts as Morality Policy: The Structure of Public Attitudes Gregory B. Lewis Successfully reframing a political issue as morality policy should strengthen the hand of those charg- ing immorality. However, reframers face a daunting task in shifting public opinion. In 1989, Christ- ian conservatives attempted to reframe the debate over federal funding for the arts from waste to immorality, by attacking grants for “anti-Christian” and “homoerotic” art. Using General Social Survey data from before, during, and after the attempted reframing, this article assesses the reframers’ success in heightening the salience of religion, commitment to civil liberties, and attitudes toward sex- uality in public thinking about government spending on the arts. Successfully reframing a political issue as morality policy should strengthen the hand of those charging immorality. Changing issue frames can shift public opinion by changing what aspects of a problem take priority in public thinking (e.g., Jacoby 2000; Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley 1997). By emphasizing moral judgments, at which everyone is an expert, a morality policy frame tends to make issues easier and more salient (Carmines and Stimson 1980; Gormley 1986). Policy entrepreneurs have some freedom to recast issues as morality policy—the issues that attract moral reasoning vary over time and across societies (Mooney 2001)—especially if moral concerns already weakly align with divisions over the issue. Issue framers face a difficult challenge, however. They must be credible to their audience, the frame must be strong and speak to the audience’s values, and the framing effort may need to be persistent (Chong and Druckman 2005). “Easy” issues have usually been on the political agenda for a long time (Carmines and Stimson 1980, 80). One effort to redefine a minor spending issue as morality policy occurred in 1989, when Christian conservatives attempted to reframe the case against federal funding for the arts from waste to immorality, arguing that the National Endow- ment for Arts (NEA) subsidized antireligious, homoerotic, and pornographic art that, in the words of Senator Jesse Helms, “denigrated, offended, or mocked [moral, decent Americans] with their own tax dollars” (Hetherman 1999). For two years, the NEA attracted unprecedented media coverage, emphasizing battles between decency and immorality, free expression and censorship. To shift public opinion, however, the reframers needed to convince average Americans that arts spending raised sufficiently weighty moral issues to warrant attention it had never received