The Importance of Being Frank

Graphical History Tour remembers former Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA), who passed away Tuesday night at age 86.

in Q SaltLake, March, 1999

Barney Frank was elected to Congress in 1980, succeeding Rev. Robert Drinan, who had left office in order to comply with Pope John Paul II's call for priests to withdraw from government positions. Q SaltLake asked me to draw the above caricature of Rep. Frank for their cover story on his upcoming speech at a dinner of the Utah Stonewall Democrats, an LGBTQ organization.

Frank earned a reputation as an outspoken, quick- and sharp-witted liberal, but it must be noted that he was very pragmatic, even on LGBTQ+ issues. In the 1990's, he counseled marriage equality advocates that the public were not ready to accept same-sex marriage. In his last public interview, however, he argued that marriage equality is safe because Republicans today would be afraid of the backlash were our marriages to be taken away.

Perhaps the interviewer thought it impolite to bring up the fate of the landmark Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act during Republican rule.

Frank wasn't the first openly gay Congressman; Gerry Studds (D-MD) had been outed at the center of a scandal over Congressmen having affairs with congressional pages. (Studds was censured in 1983 for having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old page ten years earlier; he retired from Congress in 1997.) Frank was, however, the first member of Congress to come out as gay voluntarily, in 1987.

in Ranger, University of Wisconsin at Parkside, Sept. 21, 1989 

The first cartoon I drew of Barney Frank was, unfortunately, when it appeared that his political career was about to be cut short because of a sex scandal of his own. He had befriended Steve Gobie, a prostitute, hiring him as an aide, housekeeper, and driver in 1985. He evicted Gobie in 1987 after their landlord told Frank that Gobie continued operating as a male escort, even bringing clients to their shared home.

This became public in 1989 when Gobie decided to sell his story to the highest bidder, but gave it away to the Washington Times. Frank called for a House Ethics Committee investigation, claiming to have had no knowledge of Gobie's extracurricular activities at their home. Rep. Larry Craig (R-ID) led the push to censure Frank; but in the end, he was merely reprimanded for misrepresenting Gobie's criminal probation record, and for using his congressional office to fix 33 parking tickets Gobie had racked up.

Craig, by then a senator, would have his own gay sex scandal in 2007.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Jan. 30, 1995

During a January 20, 1995 radio interview discussing a possible book deal, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) said, “I like peace and quiet and I don’t need to listen to Barney Fag, [pause] Barney Frank, haranguing in my ear because I made a few bucks off a book.” 

The slur was reported by several radio networks, whereupon Armey blamed the media for reporting on what he claimed was an audio glitch, not a slip of the tongue or intentional insult.

Rep. Frank refused to accept Armey's excuses, saying, “There are a lot of possible ways to mispronounce my name but that one, I think, is the least common, ... I turned to my own expert, my mother, who reports that in 59 years of marriage, no one ever introduced her as Elsie Fag.”

After a separate incident of Armey making a poor joke about Frank's homosexuality, a reporter asked Frank if he wanted an apology from the Texan. "I’m trying to think of what I would be less interested in than an apology from Dick Armey," he replied. "Maybe the lyrics to the national anthem of Bhutan."

for Q Syndicate, Aug., 1998

Frank's office requested the original of this cartoon. I have no idea whether he still has it.

When Republicans in Congress were holding hearings in preparation to file impeachment charges against President Bill Clinton over his sex scandal, Barney Frank seemed to be the only Democrat willing to speak up in Clinton's defense.

for Q Syndicate, Nov., 1998

Wisconsin's Second District elected Tammy Baldwin to Washington in 1998, the first out lesbian representative in Congress, so I drew Barney Frank offering her some practical advice.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2009

I tried looking up why I included Barney Frank in this cartoon about the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, but it dates from two months before I started this blog. (and I couldn't find it among oocities.com's cached pages of my previous Geocities blog). 

Did Frank call Scalia a homophobe? I guess I wouldn't have put it past him, and I can't think of another reason why I would have drawn him in the foreground.

It is, however, my best example of drawing his famously rumpled couture.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2011

This cartoon caught some ridicule from a web page (now long dormant) dedicated to ridiculing editorial cartoons, in part for daring to run afoul of the litigious Dr. Seuss Estate. The topic was the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill proposed in successive Congresses to afford workplace protections to LGBTQ+ private sector employees.

It faced stubborn resistance from Republicans and other conservatives. In 2007, Frank proposed deleting transgender rights from the bill, in what proved to be a futile ploy to attract support from moderate Republicans which succeeded only in deeply dividing the LGBTQ+ community. 

for Q Syndicate, Oct., 2007

Frank's reasoning was that transgender rights could be added back in someday if ENDA ever became law; transgender activists and their allies are profoundly disappointed by what to this day they regard as outright betrayal.

Congress never has passed ENDA in any form. In an interview with Washington Blade's Lou Chibarro, Jr., after he entered hospice care this month, Frank noted that the Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) that employment discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons is illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a ruling Frank was confident the Court would never overturn — and if it did, Congress would step in and pass ENDA into law.

He must never have met Mike Johnson.

for Q Syndicate, Dec., 2011

No, this is not my eulogy cartoon for the Congressman.

The 2010 census resulted in Massachusetts losing a seat in Congress. In the redistricting plan produced by the state legislature, the Democratic stronghold of New Bedford was removed from Frank's district. While Brookline, Newton and Wellesley remained in the district, Frank announced shortly after Governor Deval Patrick signed the redistricting plan into law that he would not run for a 17th term.

My reference, of course, is to the reported last words of Oscar Wilde, another gay icon with a not unblemished history. (In trying to verify the quotation for this post, I've found several variations on its theme, so take it with a grain of smelling salts.)

That was the last cartoon I have drawn of Barney Frank — at least so far. I am likely obliged to draw an actual eulogy cartoon for him for release next week. If not, he's got a book coming out in September.

Given his record, the book is not going to be pablum.

My Left-wing Cartoons and Francisco

Pope Francis died in the wee hours of Easter Monday after having greeted Vice President Shady Vance and the throngs who came to celebrate the Resurrection with him the previous morning. I didn't get invited to the funeral at the Vatican today, so instead, I've got a look back over his papacy for this week's Graphical History Tour.

March, 2013

I caught a little bit of flack for this initial response to Cardinal Bergoglio’s election to the papacy in 2013, but I thought it was a light, whimsical cartoon to celebrate Catholicism’s first Latin American Pope. Besides, I happened to be discovering the music of Astor Piazolla just then. 

for Q Syndicate, August, 2013

Taking his papal name in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, Bergoglio quickly showed himself to be a very, very different pope than Benedict XVI. The archconservative B-16, breaking with longstanding tradition, had resigned the papacy rather than linger in the position while cruel age slowly robbed him of mind and body. (As critical as I was of Pope Benedict, I credit him with a selfless decision many aging politicians would have done well to emulate.)

for Q Syndicate, September, 2013

Conservative Catholics in America, who had weaponized their faith to impose their beliefs on pro-choice and LGBTQ+ fellow citizens, came to be extremely disappointed in the new pontiff... 

for Q Syndicate January, 2014

...and eagerly searched for another.

Here I suggested that Minnesota Archbishop John Nienstedt, Catholic League professional umbrage taker Bill Donahue, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, anti-marriage troublemaker Maggie Gallagher, and Senator Rick Santorum would be happy to invest Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson with the scepter of St. Peter.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2015

Rowan County Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, who worked her refusal to issue to issue same-sex couples marriage licenses into national fame, subsequently boasted of having a private audience with the Pope. It eventually came to light that her private audience was shared with dozens of other Vatican visitors, and was private only in the sense that she hadn't brought the right-wing media along.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2020

Pope Francis gave his blessing to "civil unions" rather than marriage equality for same-sex couples in the fall of 2020 (although some conservative Catholics disputed the translation in English-speaking media of the papal Latin "convivenia civil"). A majority of the Catholic majority on the McConnell Supreme Court have been itching to overturn the 2014 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling favoring marriage equality in this country.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2021

Franciscan liberality notwithstanding, Catholic orthodoxy continues to condemn homosexuality as "intrinsically disordered."

As with the Anglican, Methodist, fundamentalist, and other denominations, antigay animus is especially dominant among Catholic clergy in much of Africa. Pope Francis's dialogue in this next cartoon is a direct quote, somewhat edited between panels two and three:

February, 2024

Ninety bishops and cardinals published a letter strenuously objecting to that papal pronouncement. They will be speaking up loudly as their conclave meets to elect a successor to this modern-day Pope. 

Don't be surprised to see someone more in the mold of Benedict XVI... if not Innocent IV.

✍

When I scour newspapers and magazines from 100 years ago for these Graphical History Tours, I never come across Pope Pius XI in U.S. editorial cartoons. I suppose that Protestant cartoonists didn't pay much attention to what Pius XI had to say about anything, and any Catholic cartoonists never presumed to differ with him. He did issue encyclicals criticizing capitalistic greed and warning against socialism and communism.

After initially supporting fascism in his native Italy and in Germany, Pius XI would issue an encyclical in 1937, smuggled in to Nazi Germany, lashing out against violations of a concordat between the Nazi state and the Holy See. In Mit brennender Sorge, Pius condemned "pantheistic confusion," "neopaganism," and "the so-called myth of race and blood," which he called a form of idolatry.

I bring that up in regard to modern-day cartoonists such as Michael Ramirez, who apparently believe that papal pronouncements on current politics are something new with Pope Francis.

"You'll Have to Leave That Behind" by Michael Ramirez for Las Vegas Review Journal, April 21, 2025

Pius XI never stood up to Benito Mussolini, although he was scheduled to deliver an address on February 11, 1939 in which he was expected to denounce il Duce's laws aping Nazi Arianism. The Pope died on February 10, however, and Mussolini tried to have all 300 copies of the address destroyed.

Under the next Pope, Pius XII, the Roman Catholic Church turned a blind eye to the atrocities of Mussolini and Hitler. 

Today's Republican Party and its Amen Corner cartoonists, teledemagogues, and duck dynasts would most certainly have approved.

No Supreme Court For You!

For most of my life, the Supreme Court has been dominated by its right wing. In fact, that's true of most of the history of our country; the Warren Court of the 1950's and 60's was the exception to a general tendency of the Court since the founding of the Republic to favor the rich and powerful. The Constitution was written, after all, by the landed gentry, not the Daniel Shayses, John Frieses, and Crispus Attuckses.

I alluded in this week's cartoon to the lack of requirements laid out in the U.S. Constitution for Supreme Court Justices. We can be fairly sure that the Founding Fathers would have strongly disapproved of a foreign head of state sitting on the Court; but whereas the Constitution sets limits on who may or may not be a president, vice president, congressional representative or senator, the sole defining characteristic set for justices is that they "shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour."

"Nine Old Men," unsigned (William Gropper or Jacob Burck, perhaps?), in New Masses, New York, March 9, 1937

Even the size of the Supreme Court is unspecified. In the history of the United States, the sitting members of the Supreme Court as been as few as six; Franklin Roosevelt was rebuffed in his attempt to expand the Court in a scheme that would have allowed him to add as many as six new justices to the sitting nine. If and when the Republicans lose their grasp on the other two branches of government, I wouldn't be surprised if they were hastily to double the size of the Supreme Court while they could still fill the new seats.

Donald Joffrey Trump's executive order this week to ban affirmative action programs in college admissions recalls the Court's attempt to thread that needle in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978. In the interest of meeting a set quota for minority enrollment, UC had admitted some minority students whose test scores were lower than white male Alan Bakke's. In a complicated set of four rulings, the Court ruled that UC should admit Bakke, and that the quotas violated the 1964 Equal Rights Act, but that the Equal Protection Clause allows race to be taken into consideration in college admission policies. Sort of.

Ronald Reagan's advanced age was an issue in the 1980 presidential campaign, but five of the justices on the Court were older than he. This cartoon from my sketchbook shows Justices William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall and Harry Blackmun, counted as the Court's liberal wing. (Conservatives Lewis Powell and Chief Justice Warren Burger were also older than Reagan.) Reagan came into office in 1981 determined to stack the court with reliable right-wing jurists hostile to minority rights, reproductive rights, unions, environmental protection, and a whole host of liberal causes.

Nevertheless, his first appointment, of Sandra Day O'Connor to replace Justice Potter Stewart, was received favorably, except by some right-wingers who suspected that a woman would be soft on Roe v. Wade. But when Burger retired, Reagan named Justice William Rehnquist, the most hardline conservative on the Court, to replace him as Chief Justice, and conservative firebrand Antonin Scalia as the Court's newest Justice.

In addition to Reagan's successful nominees in the center of the above cartoon, I imagined them being joined by Reagan administration officials Donald Regan, William Clark, Robert Bork, and Ed Meese, plus Clint Eastwood and Nancy Reagan. Reagan would indeed name Bork to the next vacancy, but the Democrat-led Senate voted Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre henchman down, 42 to 58.

The legacy of the Bork nomination was the creation of a verb ("Borking" has proved so much catchier than "Fortasing" or "Garlanding"), and the end of Republican nominees to the Court willing to admit to their prejudices against Roe v. Wade. It also led to Mr. Kennedy's nomination to the Court, for which, at least, LGBTQ Americans can be thankful. On the other hand, President Obama would likely have been the one to nominate the successor to Justice Bork, who died in December 2012 at age 85.

The last of the Warren Court liberals, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, retired during the George H.W. Bush administration, succeeded by David Souter and Clarence Thomas, respectively.

Liberals have had fewer opportunities to change the direction of the court. The most significant may have come with the retirement of Justice Byron White in 1993. Appointed by President Kennedy, he nevertheless tended to vote with conservatives: he and William Rehnquist were the only dissenters in Roe v. Wade, and he wrote the majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick giving the Court's blessing to laws criminalizing gay sex even between consenting adults in the privacy of one's home.

President Bill Clinton replaced White with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has since become the senior and possibly most vocal member of the Court's liberal wing.

More telling of the rightward drift of the Court, however, is the conventional wisdom that cast first Sandra Day O'Connor, then David Souter, then Anthony Kennedy in the role of casting "The Swing Vote." Never were they considered a "swing bloc" on the Court; only as one retired would the next sit in the supposed "swing" seat. (I suppose Kennedy's retirement makes Chief Justice John Roberts the Swing Vote now.)

Since America's bicentennial, Democrats have seated four justices on the Court; Republicans (assuming a swift confirmation of whomever Trump names next week) have seated nine.

That includes the most rigidly conservative examples of Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia, about whom I've devoted blog posts in the past. Today, I'm trying to widen the focus to the entire Court, but there are a few cartoons here I'm repeating from those earlier posts anyway.

I've always liked this cartoon, largely because I enjoy breaking the boundaries of a cartoon panel this way and I don't have an excuse to do it very often.

The friendship between the ideologically opposed justices Ginsburg and Scalia was legendary, but we're told that this sort of comity across ideological boundaries is a thing of the past.

American right-wingers have been salivating at the chance to overturn Roe v. Wade, and we'll soon see what else: Obergefell v. Hodges? Bob Jones University v. U.S.? Miranda v. Arizona? Loving v. Virginia? Shelley v. Kraemer? West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette? Smith v. Allwright? Near v. Minnesota? U.S. v. Darby Lumber?

Enjoy our return to the Gilded Age of robber barons, white patriarchy and sweatshops, folks.

2016 in Headlines

Since ’16back Saturday coincides with New Year's Eve this year, I'm going to post my annual photo of newspaper and magazine front pages here.

I offer my usual caveats: with only newspapers from the midwestern United States to choose from, I can't include many big international stories, such as the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. The slow crushing of the rebellion in Syria lends itself more to photojournalism than a banner headline. And I might have included the death of Fidel Castro if he hadn't already turned the reins of power over to his brother years ago.

Meanwhile, I don't have a home paper publishing my stuff that would put together a 2016 in cartoons spread, so here are my own favorites from this crappy year:

Remembering Scalia

As promised when I posted this week's cartoon, Supremeback Saturday rummages through the dank and musty files of my early cartoons throughout the admagistracy of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. (Enbiggenification available when beclickened.)

It was 1986 and Ronald Reagan was in his second term. So far, he had named Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court, filling a 1980 campaign promise to name the first female Justice. The liberal wing of the Court consisted of Justices Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, Thurgood Marshall, and William Brennan (not pictured: John Paul Stevens); Reagan clearly itched for some of them to retire.

Next to Reagan in this February, 1986 cartoon are Attorney General Ed Meese, and Appeals Court Judges Robert Bork and Richard Posner (both Reagan appointees). Is that Scalia peering over Meese's suitcase? I don't remember whether I already knew who he was or what he looked like; but that's not how I drew Nixon, and it doesn't quite look like Pat Buchanan or Joe McCarthy, either.

Nevertheless, it was Antonin Scalia's name that came up a few months later when Reagan's next opportunity to shape the Court arose. Liberals were none too enthused by Scalia's nomination, but the higher profile appointment was that of William Rehnquist to succeed fellow Nixon appointee Warren Burger as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. (Scalia was appointed to replace Rehnquist as Associate Justice.) Rehnquist was the most right-wing justice on the court at the time, having been the lone dissenter in Ake v. Oklahoma (1985), Bob Jones University v. U.S. (1983), Richmond Newspapers Inc. v. Virginia (1980) and Taylor v. Louisiana (1975). Rehnquist had also recused himself in the otherwise unanimous U.S. v. Nixon (1974).

Scalia and Rehnquist were easily confirmed anyway, and this cartoon from July, 1986 predicted that they would be joined by Donald Regan, William Clark, Bork, Meese, Clint Eastwood, and Nancy Reagan; and that claims of discrimination would become much harder to prove.

Reagan did in fact name Robert Bork to the court the next year, when Justice Powell retired; but you may remember that the Democratic Senate refused to confirm his nomination and Republicans turned his name into a verb. The Senate eventually confirmed Anthony Kennedy, in an election year, as your liberal Facebook friends have already reminded you several times. (The time between Bork's nomination and Kennedy joining the Court -- even with the aborted nomination of pot-smoker Douglas Ginsburg in the interim: 233 days.)

The first of my cartoons in which Scalia gets the starring role was in June, 2003, after Scalia's caustic dissent in Lawrence v. Texas. The case arose from the arrest of John Lawrence and Tyrone Gardner, whom Houston police found having consensual sex in Lawrence's home when they responded to an unfounded weapons complaint. The Court's decision, written by Justice Kennedy, was that Lawrence's and Gardner's right of due process was violated by Texas's laws outlawing homosexual activity between consenting adults.

Scalia scolded the majority for overturning Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) and predicted a parade of horribles: an end to state laws against obscenity, bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, and bestiality.

"Today's opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.... [T]he Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed."

Two years later, this happened:

I'm sure that today, that kid is a well-respected junior partner somewhere.

There have been two Justices on the Supreme Court whom I have particularly enjoyed drawing, and it's amusing to learn that in spite of their diametrically opposed views on so many constitutional issues. and the lively exchanges in the opinions they have authored, they were actually very close friends who shared a love of opera and celebrated New Year's Eve together year after year.

When the Court struck down the "Defense of Marriage Act" (DOMA) in U.S. v. Windsor (2013), Scalia's dissent wailed that the Court had "formally declar[ed] anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency."

And finally, last year, Scalia's prediction of the end of civilization was fully realized, as the Court voted 5-4 in favor of marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges. Each of the minority judges wrote his own dissent; Scalia called the decision "a threat to democracy." Contrast the "mummery" of the majority opinion with the sheer poetry of Scalia's uffish thoughts:

"Really? Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie."

Q Toon: Day After Day

The sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia overnight this past weekend completely changed my plans for this week's cartoon. The passing of the notoriously antigay and prickly jurist could not go unremarked. But what sort of eulogy could I possibly draw to commemorate the passing of this defender of "the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct" for publication up to a week later?

The answer came with equal suddenness as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) declared even while the body was still on the way to the morgue that Scalia's seat on the Court "should not be filled until we have a new President."

I hastily posted a grayscale version of this cartoon to the AAEC site on Monday, fearing that the place would be crawling with McConnell tortoises by Thursday. (Thankfully, no, and Jon Stewart isn't around to beat me to the punch on The Daily Show, which is in reruns this week anyway.)

I soon heard from a repeat commenter who thought I needed to be told that back in 1987, then-Congressman Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had advised the U.S. Senate not to consider any more of Ronald Reagan's Supreme Court nominees.

That's nice to know, but Schumer was not Senate Majority Leader, and I don't recall the Senate ever following the leadership of third-term members of the House. Senator Schumer's 2007 comments on Dubya's Supreme Court picks would be more germane. As would Senator Mitch McConnell's in 2005 be more germane than his opinion in 1970.

I'll be back on Supremeback Saturday with more on Justice Scalia, and probably over the next year or so with more on whomever President Obama -- or President Sanders or President Trump -- names as his successor. Especially if a 4-4 Court is asked to decide another presidential election in the meantime.

Q Toon: Gettin' Jiggery-Pokery With It

When I read Jen Sorensen's email about drawing a cartoon for Fusion about the Supreme Court's decision for marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges, I only had time to draw one cartoon before her deadline and Q Syndicate's. (My drawing LGBT-themed cartoons for anyone other than Q Syndicate is also something of a contractual issue.) Had my time and my relationship with my editors been freer, I could easily have made two separate cartoons out of this one:

The idea on the left side of the cartoon is essentially a follow-up to the cartoon I drew last October illustrating Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s quotation about the arc of history bending toward justice. In an early sketch of this week's cartoon, the dissenting justices on the right side of the drawing were sitting on a porch in rocking chairs, shaking their fists at nothing in particular; no rainbow, no pot of gold wedding bands.

Now, I could argue that the rainbow clarifies what the topic of the cartoon is. The Supremes issued major rulings one on top of another last week, and people could get confused. (Heck, some people are sure to get confused. Chip Bok drew a cartoon yesterday about Justice Roberts's Obamacare ruling, and no small number of the commenters at GoComics thought it was somehow about marriage equality instead.)

I did, after all, include Justice Scalia's "jiggery-pokery" epithet in my cartoon, even though it came not from his Obergefell dissent but from his fulmination against Chief Justice Roberts's King v. Burwell opinion. I did try to find some equally obscure contumely in Scalia's Obergefell dissent to use instead, but Scalia had apparently misplaced his English-to-Flobbadob dictionary when writing it and settled for "Go ask a hippie."

By the way, when researching what I wanted to say in this blog entry, I looked up the dissenting opinions in the court's 1967 Loving v. Virginia case, which ruled unconstitutional state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. I couldn't find any, because there were none. That court's ruling was unanimous.

Judging from the four, count 'em, four dissenting opinions in Obergefell, I'd be willing to bet that there would have been a dissenting opinion in Loving had Roberts, Scalia, Thomas or Alito traveled back in time to sit on the high court in 1967.

Marriage Equality Flashback

In celebration of today's Supreme Court ruling extending marriage equality to all fifty states -- and the separate dissents by each and every one of the justices in the minority, here's a cartoon from last year. 

Chief Justice Roberts wasn't in this cartoon, but I have a sneaking feeling he'll join this hapless trio in next week's cartoon.

Q Toon: Schaerr Madness

The people who file amici curia briefs for Supreme Court cases don't actually get to appear before the court -- which is kind of a shame, because it would be fun to see what the justices would say to those friends of the court.

Gene Schaerr, a former clerk to Justices Warren Burger and Antonin Scalia, filed an amicus curia brief  in which he seriously claimed on behalf of "100 scholars of marriage" that if same-sex couples are allowed to marry, the result will be at least 900,000 more abortions. 

Now, I admit that Mr. Schaerr did not claim that gays and lesbians are eager to exercise the right to have abortions, as I have him doing in this week's cartoon.

No, his explanation makes even less sense.

"A reduction in the opposite-sex marriage rate means an increase in the percentage of women who are unmarried and who, according to all available data, have much higher abortion rates than married women. And based on past experience, institutionalizing same-sex marriage poses an enormous risk of reduced opposite-sex marriage rates."

By the same logic, having a bus system results in more car accidents, because many people who ride the bus would be people who don't have driver's licenses, and people who don't have their driver's licenses are worse drivers than people who do have licenses.

Most people avoid eating citrus fruit after brushing their teeth because citrus fruit tastes bad after minty toothpaste. People who don't eat citrus fruit run a much greater risk for scurvy than people who do. Therefore brushing one's teeth causes scurvy.

Q Toon: Regnum Anatium

One could argue that highlighting Duck Dynast Phil Robertson's antigay comments in GQ Magazine only serves the purposes of Sarah Palin, talk radio, and all the Foxsters out there complaining that A&E is trampling his right of free speech. Not that they ever came to the defense of free speech rights for, say, Martin Bashir, Alec Baldwin, or Keith Olberman.

His opinions regarding African-Americans are the more ridiculous and worthy of censure. But I draw for the LGBT media through Q Syndicate, so I'm afraid I must leave to others his claim that Blacks were happier before civil rights and antipoverty programs ("No one was singing the blues"). I would, however, like to assuage Mr. Robertson's fears that anatomy poses an insurmountable difficulty to gays' and lesbians' ability to have and to enjoy sex. We really are not bothered by it anywhere near as much as he is.

Meanwhile, this Greek chorus of conservative American Catholics makes its second appearance in my cartoons this week. (Here's their first appearance, in September.)

Q Toon: Small Minds Rule!

This cartoon could have been one big mess of labels.

I had initially thought that the reporter talking to Pope Francis (I shouldn't need to label him, should I?) ought to have the name of the magazine in which the "small-minded rules" interview appeared. But the magazine's name is American, and having that as the label would be confusing in its own way.

But how to label the cabal in the larger panel of the cartoon? "American Catholic Conservatives"? Admittedly, I have enough room in the panel's pan-handle for that, but it's awfully clunky. It would be clunkier still to label them each individually, although I really can't expect any reader to be able to identify all of them. Two of them have never appeared in my cartoons before.

Here are the answers to the American Catholic Conservative Quiz.

From left to right: Minnesota Archbishop John Nienstedt. Nienstedt has required Catholic students in his diocese to attend lectures expounding the evils of marriage equality, has issued orders to priests that if they disagree with his antigay stands they should shut the hell up about it, and has declared that condoms are the work of the devil.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Is there any need to explain his virulent antigay streak?

House Speaker John Boehner. He "can't imagine" ever supporting gay marriage. And then there's the allegation by former Congressman Bob Ney that on an overseas junket, Boehner said of a staffer, "Yeah, he's a good guy. I think he's a fag." I needed a Catholic politician currently in office (other than Scalia), and Boehner seemed like the most recognizable of the lot -- enough so that I could put him in the back of the crowd.

Former Senator, 2012 presidential candidate, and frothy mixture Rick Santorum, who famously equated same-sex marriage with "man-on-dog" bestiality.

National Organization for Marriage harridan Maggie Gallagher. I've drawn her often enough now that my caricature of her is actually my caricature of my caricature of her. If she hasn't been in your state lately to man the battlements against marriage equality, her face might not be familiar to you; I've been criticized before for not identifying her.

Catholic League blowhard Bill Donohue. This is my first try at his face, which should be familiar to prime-time cable crosstalk-fests and South Park devotées. Whenever anyone slights the Catholic Church in any way, no matter how justified the slight may be, Bill Donohue is on TV quicker than Gloria Allred to defend its integrity to the death.

Q Toon: Scalia on the Rocks

Here at long last is my cartoon about last week's Supreme Court ruling against California's Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Justice Antonin Scalia's sclerotic dissent in United States v. Windsor is less about finding strict constitutional arguments in favor of Prop 8 and DOMA than bitching about the damn kids today:

"In the majority’s judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement. To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to ‘disparage,’ ‘injure,’ ‘degrade,’ ‘demean,’ and ‘humiliate’ our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homosexual. All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence— indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society to elect change, it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race."

Enemies of the human race, no less! In his prior arguments that it is gays and lesbians who justly deserve odium humani generis, Justice Scalia has proven no stranger to wild overstatement. In Romer v. Evans (1996), Scalia dissented from the majority opinion affirming a Colorado law forbidding localities from discriminating against LGBT citizens. Scalia could see no difference between homosexuality and homicide:

" I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible—murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals—and could exhibit even 'animus' toward such conduct. Surely that is the only sort of 'animus' at issue here: moral disapproval of homosexual conduct[.]" 

As Adam Serwer observed in Mother Jones, "It's true that people generally disapprove of murder, but there's more going on in laws banning murder than mere disfavor—the rights of the person being murdered, for example."

Scalia probably doesn't read Mother Jones, but he at least restrained himself from of likening gays and lesbians to Charles Manson in his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas (2003):

"The Texas statute undeniably seeks to further the belief of its citizens that certain forms of sexual behavior are 'immoral and unacceptable,' Bowers, supra, at 196–the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity.  ...  State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision.”

The Republic may survive the nullification of state laws against masturbation, but Scalia had surely hoped that his parade of horribles would bring a Christian nation to its senses. For a time, as Republicans raced a series of antigay constitutional amendments through the the states, he probably did feel vindicated.

But as young people continue to come of age in a world where gays and lesbians are openly joining into committed relationships and raising families of their own without any demonstrable deterioration of heterosexual marriage, Scalia is left to fume:

Why can't they be like we were, perfect in every way?
What's the matter with kids today?

Q Toon: Can't Figure Out the Cable Remote, Either

“Traditional marriage has been around for thousands of years. Same-sex marriage is very new. I think it was first adopted in The Netherlands in 2000. So there isn't a lot of data about its effect. And it may turn out to be a — a good thing; it may turn out not to be a good thing, as the supporters of Proposition 8 apparently believe. But you want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution which is newer than cell phones or the internet? I mean we— we are not —we do not have the ability to see the future.” — Justice Samuel Alito. (Link.)

Why, for its first forty years or so, the U.S. Supreme Court sat around without taking any cases at all, reasoning that the whole damn country was an institution newer than the the lightning conductor or the steam engine.

On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that same-sex marriage is older than the Constitution.

"In the period up to roughly the thirteenth century, male bonding ceremonies were performed in churches all over the Mediterranean. These unions were sanctified by priests with many of the same prayers and rituals used to join men and women in marriage. The ceremonies stressed love and personal commitment over procreation, but surely not everyone was fooled. Couples who joined themselves in such rituals most likely had sex as much (or as little) as their heterosexual counterparts."

Q Toon: RBG on DOMA

Last week, as a way of declining to answer a question from a Colorado law student on the subject, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg predicted that DOMA (the so-called Defense of Marriage Act) was likely to come before the court in the upcoming term.

Somehow, I think this is Justice Ginsburg's first appearance in my cartoons. I don't recall drawing any cartoons about her when President Clinton nominated her to the bench in 1993, or when the Supreme Court decided the 2000 presidential election, or when she pointedly cited Romneycare in her opinion upholding the Affordable Care Act last year.

Q Toon: John Lawrence

John Lawrence, the plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas, died on November 20 at the age of 68. While his death was not kept secret, it only came to national attention after a lawyer in the case attempted to invite him to a commemoration of the ruling.

Tyron Garner, the other man arrested with Mr. Lawrence (and also a petitioner in the court case), died in 2006.

The arrest stemmed from a false complaint from a malicious neighbor of gunshots in Lawrence's apartment, because of which a Harris County, Texas, sheriff's deputy entered the unlocked apartment with gun drawn.

In a curious development, Dale Carpenter (who used to write for Q Syndicate in its early days) is coming out with a book in March which charges that Lawrence and Garner were not in fact engaged in any sex act when arrested for “deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex”; indeed, Lawrence had told Carpenter that the two had never had sexual intercourse before, during or since.

At any rate, the Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that Texas' antisodomy law was an unconstitutional infringement of personal liberty, overturning an earlier case, Bowers v. Hardwick. In his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia, departing from his insistence that only the U.S. Constitution should inform a case, trotted out a parade of horrors that the court's decision would void laws defending Civilization against same-sex marriage, bigamy, prostitution, bestiality, necrophilia, and masturbation. (And what hope does Civilization have if the State can't outlaw masturbation in the privacy of one's home?)

The court's ruling voided anti-sodomy statutes in thirteen states. If you live in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Oklahoma, Missouri, Utah, Idaho or Michigan, you can thank John Geddes Lawrence for fighting for the right of you and your consenting adult partner to deviate from the missionary position without ending up on the National Registry of Sex Offenders, condemned to jail time followed by living under a freeway overpass.

Thanks to Dr. Thomas Schmeling for alerting me to this story!