Q Toon: Smokin' in the Boys' Room

Having to draw this week's cartoon days before Alabama Republicans went to the polls to nominate Baptist Inquisitor Roy Moore for the U.S. Senate, I had to find another topic (on the way, way, way outside chance that Alabama Republicans might join the 21st Century on Tuesday). I found it in Donald Joffrey Trump's nomination to a federal judgeship in Texas of another politician of Moore's ilk.

Jeff Mateer is a theocratic culture warrior in the Texas Attorney General's office who has preached that transgender schoolchildren are a sign of "Satan's plan."

"In Colorado, a public school has been sued because a first grader and I forget the sex, she's a girl who thinks she's a boy or a boy who thinks she's a girl, it's probably that, a boy who thinks she's a girl," Mateer said in a video posted on Vimeo in 2015 and reviewed by CNN's KFile. "And the school said, 'Well, she's not using the girl's restroom.' And so she has now sued to have a right to go in. Now, I submit to you, a parent of three children who are now young adults: a first grader really knows what their sexual identity? I mean, it just really shows you how Satan's plan is working and the destruction that's going on."

The link from the CNN page to Mateer's speech on Vimeo yields a "Sorry, we couldn't find that page" message, but there are other speeches in which the First Liberty Institute propagandist sermonizes about the persecution of conservative Christians who are forced to coexist against their will with LGBT persons.

In another speech, Mateer lamented that states have banned "conversion therapy," in which quack psychiatrists inspired by the Bible and A Clockwork Orange purport to turn LGBT victims straight. He believes that marriage equality will lead to people getting married to dogs, trees and summer breezes, and plenty of other such nonsense.

And he is not alone among Trump judicial appointees in such views. Matthew Kacsmaryk, nominated to another Texas district court, is a deputy general counsel to the First Liberty Institute. Leonard Grasz, nominated last month to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, is on the board of a Nebraska organization that defends conversion therapy.

Whatever Mr. Trump's personal beliefs on LGBT persons' rights may be, it is clear that the crew making judicial appointments for him are steadfastly antigay. And determined to stock the American courts system for decades to come with activist judges for whom the book of Leviticus always trumps the Constitution.