Love this story.

From the LA Times-

Capital Wags-
The whimsical donkeys and elephants all over Washington has some people butting heads over art and politics

Apparently, D.C. has this thing going were local artists are either painting or making sculptures of Elephants and Donkey's. Part of a local art, community type thing. The Times says:

"Decorated as everything from Elvis Presley to a tourist donning an FBI baseball cap and sporting a video camera, the animals are providing a touch of whimsy to a city shadowed by terrorism. Painted by local artists and pop artists these 800-pound sculptures of polyurethane resin depicting Republicans (elephants) and Democrats (donkeys) are bringing smiles--and a few rolled eyes--to residents and visitors alike."

The idea came from other cities, like Miami, New Orleans and LA and was widely popular in both the cities that had them earlier and in D.C.

But wait…..

First, the Green Party started bitching because they're not represented. Naturally, they sued. "Party officials wanted the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities to decorate the streets with 100 sunflowers--their party emblem." A judge told them to fuggedaboutit and ruled that the animals aren't political speech, but art.

But then P.E.T.A got into the act. They wanted an elephant to be shown to be depicted as Elephant would in the Circus. They wanted to show a "shackled circus elephant with a tear running down its face and a bull hook in its side. Hiring New Yorker magazine artist Harry Bliss, PETA designed an elephant to represent the "miserable, deprived, and broken animals used in circuses ... forced to perform uncomfortable, confusing, and often painful acts over and over again under the threat of thrashings with a bull hook."


The committee rejected it for the obvious reason that nobody wants to see something like that, so P.E.T.A, of course, sued. Obvious case of "'discrimination based on message'," said Arthur Spitzer, the ACLU lawyer handling the case for PETA. Public art, he said, "'is not a forum for just happy speech'." Right.


So, as a result, there's one elephant left that hasn't been painted, waiting for a judge's ruling whether "P.E.T.A has a constitutional right to use the beast for a message about mistreatment of circus animals."

Good to see there's another city as screwed up as San Francisco.