If a picture is supposed to speak a thousand words, then Rudolph Giuliani needs to pipe down for a moment and let some controversial photographs in the Brooklyn Museum of Art speak for themselves.

The New York mayor is waging a holy war against taxpayer-supported institutions that display art such as Renee Cox’s “Yo Mama’s Last Supper,” which the Catholic official deems “disgusting” and “anti-Catholic.” Cox’s five-panel photo piece, which is on exhibit with about 200 works of art, paints a different scene of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.”

Cox, a black woman, depicts Jesus standing naked in the central panel. Sitting at the table on either side of her are the 12 apostles, portrayed by black men. Cox, who was raised a Catholic, wanted to express her frustration with what she believes to be a male-dominated religion.

“Why can’t a woman be Christ?” she asked in the Feb. 16 Chicago Tribune. “We are the givers of life.”

This wasn’t the first time Giuliani was offended and outraged with an exhibit at the museum. In 1999, a painting by Catholic, Nigerian-born Chris Ofili raised a stink in New York just as much as Giuliani did. His portrait “Holy Virgin Mary” was an abstract profile of the saintly mother covered in chunks of elephant dung, which is used in Nigerian tribal rituals, and cutouts from pornographic magazines.

When the portrait of the Madonna was displayed, Giuliani froze $7.2 million in public funding and sued the museum to get it evicted. The museum fought back with its own lawsuit and won, getting its funds reinstated with an additional $5.8 million out of the city’s pocket.

Learning a lesson from his first attack, Giuliani this time is creating a decency panel. Its members would set standards on artwork which museums would have to follow in order to receive government funding. If upheld in court, decency panels could pop up all over the nation and provide cities with the power to keep questionable art out of taxpayer-supported buildings.

In Monday’s Chicago Tribune, no details were given by Giuliani as to who would be on the panel. He was quoted only as saying that the members would “presumably be decent people.” The trouble is that the process of picking people to judge art is as subjective as the message conveyed by the art itself.

Giuliani’s reaction to Cox’s art is not completely unreasonable. Her piece dishes out much to be interpreted, and the outspoken mayor of the Big Apple hesitates as little as Cox does with his take on what the artwork says.

“If it were done against another group,” he said, “there would be an outcry in this city that would demand that they take the photograph down, but anti-Catholicism is just an accepted prejudice. It is allowed in the city and in our society.”

I think if we pay attention to cheap shots taken at the expense of a certain religion, Christianity would top the list. And it often seems the repercussions for belittling this faith are rather minute. But Cox is Catholic, so shouldn’t she have the right to express an opinion about her own religion, even if it offends others?

Law professor Mark Cordes, who teaches a First Amendment class this semester, says Cox & and anyone for that matter & has a right to free speech, but the issue gets cloudy when the public’s money supports that controversial speech.

“Clearly, she has the right to voice her opinion,” Cordes said. “And I don’t think Giuliani would object to that, either. But I think Giuliani’s issue is about whether taxpayers’ money should subsidize something that may offend the taxpayer.”

Getting peeved by what others say under the public eye obviously is nothing new. Most recently, Eminem’s anti-everything lyrics have been used as an argument to censor material that is blatantly offensive. While music and art appear to be one of the last few places for free honest-to-God expression, I think artwork, such as what Cox and Ofili have produced, is different from “blare it out your car window for the whole world to hear” music.

This artwork sits in a museum. Cox’s piece wasn’t intended to be the main focus of the exhibit, which is entitled “Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers.” Giuliani brought the artwork to the front pages, not Cox. If people don’t want to see her interpretations of Catholicism, they don’t have to walk into the museum and feast their eyes on her photographs.

Kenneth Paulson, executive director of the First Amendment Center, a free-speech research foundation at Vanderbilt University, studies America’s growing intolerance to certain artistic expressions.

“We’re seeing increasingly that Americans have a great concern about offensive speech and offensive art,” he said. “And there’s been a backlash against free expression as a result. The land of the free has become the land of the easily offended.”

I don’t think Cox’s artwork could have said it better itself.