My former colleague Alex Seitz-Wald, now at Salon, has a great, and unnerving story about a battle over the future of Alabama’s public television network, where a conservative board pushed the network to air videos by a discredited evangelical historian, to roll back its long-standing statement in favor of diversity, including sexual orientation, and to fire the network’s executive director Allan Pizzato. Alex writes that the fight, which is consistent with conservative efforts to demand that bogus history and science be accorded equal respect with rigorously tested conclusions, may be a pretext for something much larger:

APT’s chief operating officer, Charles Grantham, also resigned, as did an interim director appointed by the commission, though the resignation has not gone into effect for the latter. Grantham wrote an open letter to the governor on July 19 expressing dire concerns about the future of the nation’s oldest public broadcasting network. “Now a shadow is being cast over APT by its own directors. … It is my belief that the firings were based solely on ideological differences and personality clashes between Mr. Pizzato and some of the commissioners,” he wrote. The letter goes on to note that “some actions might jeopardize the licenses of APT” and concludes, “If something is not done immediately to stop this destructive spiral, it may be that history will record that under the watch of Governor Robert Bentley, Alabama Educational Television died an untimely death.”

Some critics have speculated that this may be the ultimate goal of the activist faction of the commission. Across the country, public broadcasting budgets are on the chopping block. Republicans in Washington tried to strip funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR has long been a bugaboo of conservative activists, and anti-spending Tea Partyers are opposed on principle to taxpayer funding for public broadcasting. “There could be a much bigger, darker picture here,” our source said. The commissioners, several of whom have political ambitions, could “go back to our constituents and say, ‘yes! We got rid of this godless liberal public television,’” the source noted.

Part of what’s sad about efforts like these to either use public television to advance a particular point of view or to eliminate it entirely on the grounds that public broadcasting and public support for the arts is somehow ridiculous, is that they lose sight of what these programs are actually about: equity of access. As James Poniewozik pointed out in a piece last year, cutting funding for public broadcasting doesn’t mean that all stations everywhere will go away. Instead, stations with narrower supporter bases, often those that serve poorer or rural communities, will disappear as public networks in urban areas with a large pool of donors to draw from will survive. The people who are going after public television in Alabama may only see their ability to air David Barton’s arguments that America’s roots are actually Christianist at stake. It’s too bad they can’t widen their focus and see that in the process, they may jeopardize children’s access to educational programing, and a low-priced way for adults to see sophisticated, family-friendly shows that conservatives and fans of good television alike ought to be on board for.

Mitt Romney started the primary campaign by suggesting that federal arts funding should be cut in half. Now, in an interview with Fortune Magazine, he’s gone a step further, and has said that as president, he would entirely eliminate the subsidies for PBS, and for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. That shift in his position might be more devastating to the people who benefit from those subsidies, both as employees and as audiences for the work supported by them. But it’s a move that, rather than clarifying Romney’s views on the proper scope of government, move him deeper into a dodge that reveals the fundamental unseriousness of beating up on the arts.

Talking about cutting arts funding is a diversionary tactic, both in terms of the amount of money that would actually be saved by doing so, and in terms of a philosophical discussion about what the proper funding of government is. The arts are an easy thing to toss to the crowd because you can cherry-pick an example of something that was funded by the NEA or NEH that will sound silly to someone, even if it has tremendous value in terms of preserving folklife traditions or ensuring access to arts and culture to rural communities. Arts funding is a way at getting at an interesting question. Should the government perform functions only that we believe shouldn’t be allowed to be controlled by private interests, like control, regulation, and deployment of the armed forces? Or should it step into voids left by private enterprise and personal charity when there are important functions that don’t appear to be supported by the market? That’s a real conversation, and scapegoating arts funding is a way of avoiding it.

And the profound unseriousness of going after spending by targeting programs with small budgets and without constituencies that are perceived to be powerful (or as is the case with Amtrak, something else Romney has proposed cutting funding for, with constituencies it’s politically valuable to rope-a-dope with) is really something that Republican politicians should be held accountable for. There are a lot of conservatives who enjoy the credit for talking about shrinking government but don’t actually want to be held responsible for taking things away from people, and the arts are a convenient space for them to stake that particular ground. It would be awfully nice if Paul Ryan’s addition to the Republican ticket forced Romney out of that space and into an honest debate about what shrinking government would mean. But it strikes me as more likely that Ryan will get pulled into this sliver of territory that lets conservatives talk and talk about spending, without actually having something meaningful, and difficult, to say.

With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to intellectual property rights to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture — but also about how they think about the role of government.

Of all the lawmakers I’ve looked at in this series, far and away the biggest surprise to me has been the record of Pennsylvania’s former Republican Senator Rick Santorum. I never would have expected that Santorum would be a fan of the arts, much less one of the Republicans who bucked attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts and went out of his way to seek federal financial support for the arts in Pennsylvania. But he is. Though Santorum’s more conservative on issues of copyright and intellectual property, and he’s supported various federal decency efforts, that perspective on the arts remains a surprise, and compared to some of his competitors in the Republican primary, frankly a welcome one:

1991: Santorum voted with House Republicans to ban the National Endowment for the Arts from supporting projects that could be considered obscene.

1995: During fights over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, arts advocates lobbied Santorum, who was generally opposed to the idea that a few pieces of controversial art were grounds for dismantling the agency. He defended public broadcasting programs, even as he insisted that government support wasn’t critical to their survival, saying, “I have my share of ‘Shining Time Station’ puzzles for my 4-year-old and my 2-year-old…I have a bunch of this stuff – Mr. Rogers, a wonderful man…who does a tremendous show.” He supported cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but not in direct funding to local broadcasters.

1997: Santorum publicly backed NEA funding, saying, ”The arts foster a strong sense of community and bring new ideas and cultures to many individuals and families all over the nation. Elimination of such programs would create a cultural vacuum that could not be easily filled.”

1998: As the fights over the NEA’s existence faded, Santorum’s spokeswoman said he was unlikely to support measures to axe the agency or make further deep cuts in its budget. That won him criticism from conservatives, though his problem in Pennsylvania was generally being regarded as too conservative rather than too moderate. At the 2000 Republican convention, Pennyslvania Republican activist and former RNC member Elsie Hillman actually cited Santorum’s stances on the arts as proof that he was a moderate, rather than a hardcore conservative, something that was hurting Santorum’s reelection prospects. That same year, though, he voted against a Clinton budget that would have provided $1.75 million for an arts and science education center in Pennsylvania.

2000: Santorum tried, and failed, to bring forward legislation that would have created a universal ratings system across the entertainment industry, rather than the varying and voluntary systems that existed at the time and that exist now (interestingly, the GAO study I cited earlier in the day suggested that most parents assume there is a universal ratings system rather than a patchwork of codes). He’d bring up the issue of ratings again in 2004, publicly supporting an industry-backed effort to designate an Entertainment Ratings and Labeling Awareness Month.

2002: Santorum weighed in on copyright issues, suggesting that it was a mistake to change patent law to let generic drugs get to the market more quickly on the grounds that it would stifle innovation. He also called for investigations into peer-to-peer networks on the grounds that they made it easier for minors to access pornography.

2003: Santorum cosigned a letter along with a number of his Republican colleagues encouraging the administration to seek stricter enforcement of World Trade Organization rules on China to curb, among other things, software and content piracy. (In more contemporary news, he doesn’t appear to have a position on the PROTECT IP act.)

2005: The arts may not have been enough of a priority for Santorum to get him to vote for an overall budget, but he wasn’t above accepting funding for projects in his state when he thought they’d support the economy as well as the arts. When the Department of Housing and Urban Development allocated $4.3 million to convert an eyeglasses factory into an arts and education center, Santorum said, “This loan guarantee will provide resources needed to make capital improvements to the building and strengthen the local economy. The projects that are benefiting from this funding will ensure that Reading remains a great place to live and do business.” The following year, he and Sen. Arlen Specter secured $300,000 in federal funding towards a $35.9 million capital campaign to fund a August Wilson Center for African American Culture.

2006: Santorum was a cosponsor of the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which jacked Federal Communications Commissions fines from $32,500 for each violation to $325,000, with a cap of $3 million in fines for a single broadcast day.

Given that Santorum’s been out of office for some time, and competitors like Michele Bachmann have staked out positions to the right of him on social issues like equal marriage rights as well as federal arts funding issues, it might be worth asking if Santorum still holds to his old support for the NEA, and to figure out where he stands on PROTECT IP. If you get the opportunity to pose those questions, feel free to steal them — just report back here.

With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture—but also about how they think about the role of government.

Michele Bachmann’s career in politics has been fairly short, and her record on the arts is correspondingly fairly flimsy. But what record she does has indicates staunch opposition to any government role in supporting the arts.

2006: As a GOP state senator, Bachmann opposed an amendment to the Minnesota constitution that would have raised the state’s sales tax to fund development of outdoor spaces and the arts. At the time, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Bachmann said: “Republicans support the arts just as much as Democrats support the arts. The only question is who will pay for it? We don’t want government choosing which arts are subsidized and which ones aren’t.”

2009: Now in Congress, Bachmann votes against the omnibus appropriations bill. Her reasoning? “Even more incredulous is the fact that this omnibus appropriations bill contains funding for many of the same agencies and programs that already received funds in the so-called ‘stimulus’ bill—162 programs in fact,” she said, according to the States News Service. “We also have funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, which, fresh off receiving $50 million from the ‘stimulus,’ is now in line to receive $138 million in this latest proposal.”

2010: Bachmann cosponsored a bill introduced by Rep. Doug Lamborn that would have eliminated funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

2011: When Bachmann proposed an alternative to President Obama’s budget earlier this year, the MN Progressive Project noted that her outline would have eliminated the National Endowment for the Arts. Later that year, she voted for passage of H.R. 1076, which would have stripped all funding from National Public Radio and banned the federal government from spending money on radio content.

None of these are particularly novel or surprising positions for someone of Bachmann’s stated beliefs. She may have genuine policy eccentricities, but when it comes to the arts, Bachmann’s a predictable small-government conservative.