The picture police raises its judgy head in Texas

Four of photographer Sally Mann’s pictures of her three children in their birthday suits captioned “Diaries of Home” were taken down from the walls of Texas’s Modern Art Museum owing to complaints that they are pornographic.

Dictionaries define pornographic pictures as aiming to stir sexual excitement. Given the complainers’ concern that the sight of bared children is arousing, one wonders how they withstand all the Madonna and Child paintings showing an undiapered Jesus. It must be hell for them.

Consider Peter Paul Rubens’ “Holy Family with St. Elizabeth and the Infant St. John the Baptist.” What you see is an intimate scene of four figures surrounding the completely uncovered Christ Child, who stands in the center facing out and exposing his frontal anatomy.

This work has been around since 1614 without anyone going blind. Instead, it's long been seen as a moment of spiritual and familial union – something that, dare I say, might be said of Mann’s “Diaries of Home.”

A statement from the Texas museum pinned the censorship on “some locals and politicians claiming Mann’s images are ‘child porn.’”If there ever was a teaching moment at this Texas museum, Mann’s art is it. Why didn’t anyone point to the absence of erotic activity. And , Mann’s exhibit title is “Diaries at Home,” not “Dolce Vita.”

Giving in to the complainers without an enlightening word served only to harden their twisted thinking.

Of course, censoring nudity in art is not new in America. I’m thinking of the parents in Florida who rid their children’s school of its principal for allowing an art class to view a photograph of Michelangelo’s “David,” faulting it as “porn.”

If only these parents had learned what their tossed-out school principal was teaching their children, they would have known that more than five centuries ago the citizens of Florence so revered the statue that they wanted to install it on the roof of the Florence Cathedral.It was only to improve the view of the statue that the Florentines opted to install it in the public square.

Granted, not everyone nowadays knows this history. Even so, it’s expected that parents of students at a school called Tallahassee Classical School with a website proclaiming an agenda of “classical education,” would see this class-style sculpture for more than its state of undress.

Meanwhile, back in Texas, it’s hard to understand why its museum didn’t reassure those objecting to Mann’s work that it had been widely viewed in museums throughout the world for more than 30 years and no one went blind. So, shame on this museum for removing Mann’s pictures without telling the complainers they were wrong, and running from the truth like a frightened dog when the bigger dog growled.