I finally got around this week to commending Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow (D-Royal Oak) for rising to the defense of LGBTQ+ youth last month. Then somebody leaked Samuel Alito's screed draft opinion rejecting women's reproductive rights, and I quickly churned out a cartoon in response to that, putting this one again on the back burner.
Well, here it is at long last.
McMorrow's floor speech, recounted in her Twitter thread shortly afterward, came in response to a fundraising email from fellow State Senator Lana Theis (R-Brighton) in which Theis accused McMorrow of "grooming and sexualizing children" for the evil LGBTQ conspiracy.
It might have been a simple thing to draw Sen. Theis as the other person in my cartoon, but this "groomer" label issue is so much bigger than one obscure Republican from Brighton, Michigan. The label has been embraced and bandied about by the entire fascist wing of the Republican party and their propagandists in mass and social media.
Daily Cartoonist columnist Mike Peterson came up with the observation that "groomer" is the right-wingers' new "n―― lover." I have to agree; and it would make for a powerful cartoon if there were any way to make the point without actually using that word.
Instead, I settled on picking out a few quotations from Sen. McMorrow's speech, and creating a foil as the opposition's Picture of Dorian Gray. I regret having to leave out so much of her speech, such as her describing herself as a "straight, White, Christian, suburban mom," instilled by her mother with a belief that faith is "about recognizing our privilege and blessings and doing what we could to be of service to others, especially people who were marginalized, targeted, who had less... often unfairly."
It ain't easy coming up with a cartoon saying "Good job!" in any original way; Michigan cartoonist John Auchter settled for quoting the last sentence of her speech, adding himself in the corner offering only, "What more needs to be said?"
What more, indeed.
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