Congressman Doug Lamborn helped ignite a firestorm in his House of Representatives subcommittee on Friday when he agreed to ban a photo of a little girl in a bathtub from a hearing. The naked 5-year-old girl in the photo was curled up in a pool of brownish slime-looking water, in a depiction of the impact coal mining has in many parts of West Virginia.

Maria Gunnoe, the award-winning environmental activist who submitted the picture, said it was a perfect demonstration of how mountaintop-removing coal mining sends poisonous chemicals into homes. The brownish water contained both arsenic and iron, she said, and probably other chemicals.

Click here to view the photo.

But not only was the photo disallowed, but Gunnoe was taken by the arm by Capitol Police after the hearing and taken to a room to be questioned. There, it was suggested that the picture was child pornography.

“His words were, ‘The committee said that this photo was suggestive of child pornography,’” said Gunnoe, who works with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

As soon as word of the accusation broke, news sites across the Internet picked up the story, and the photo itself, by professional photographer Katie Falkenberg, has made the rounds. It’s part of series of photos at katiefalkenberg.com labeled “The Human Toll: Mountaintop Removal Mining.”

“That committee just didn’t want that photo displayed for people to see,” said Gunnoe. “They don’t want people to know that our children have to bathe in that water or not at all.”

Staff members of the Subcommittee on Energy and Natural Resources didn’t see it her way. They saw the photo as an “inappropriate” submission, and recommended to the subcommittee’s leadership that the picture be disallowed. Lamborn, the subcommittee’s chair, agreed.

Lamborn, a Colorado Springs Republican, said the photo was a step too far.

“The U.S. House is the people’s House, and if materials are inappropriate, they should not be displayed publicly,” Lamborn said.

Gunnoe, a 44-year-old grandmother, said she was deeply offended by the suggestions she would even submit something harmful to children.

“That is character assassination,” Gunnoe said.

Lamborn said he hadn’t looked at the photo before he denied its admission, and he hasn’t looked at it since the hearing, because it’s of a child bathing.

“I did not want to see the photograph, and I do not want to see it now,” said Lamborn. “If something is inappropriate, I don’t want to see it.”

Lamborn said he didn’t ask Capitol Police to question Gunnoe, and didn’t suggest that the picture was child pornography. He said he didn’t know who had spoken to Capitol Police.

Spencer Pederson, press secretary for the House Committee on Natural Resources, said in a press release that it was the committee’s senior staff that had contacted Capitol Police. In the release, he also called the picture “inappropriate for a congressional hearing.”

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