Q Toon: Xed Out

On her first day on the job as Governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued an executive order banning the word "Latinx" from government documents.

The order, which she says was issued "to respect the Latino community," says that "ethnically insensitive and pejorative language," and the term Latinx specifically, "has no place" in government documents or employee titles. 

Latinx, by definition, is a gender-neutral alternative to Latina or Latino. 

"One can no more easily remove gender from Spanish and other romance languages than one can remove vowels and verbs from English," the order says.

RLY?

K

WTVR

As one of the former Press Secretaries for Donald Joffrey Trump, SHS presumably knows a thing or two about language, and I can't dispute that "Latinx" grates the ears of some Latinos and Latinas — much the same as they/them preferred pronouns do to some Anglx stick-in-the-muds.

Nouns have gender in Spanish, as do the adjectives modifying them, and there isn't a neuter option as there was in the language from which Spanish sprang.

I can imagine some pedant in the dawn of the Dark Ages grousing about the pueri hodie dropping all the neuter declensions from their lingo like a bunch of damn Ostrogoths. But such are the dynamics of language, especially when cultures meet and mingle.

Far be it from me to tell Hispanophones how their language should be run. Personally, I'd let the genderqueer niñxs keep "Latinx" and get rid of that ll thing. But that's just yx. 

Sinceramente tuyx,

Su amigx Pablx

Q Toon: Casscoe at the Bat

The Arkansas legislature overwhelmingly overrode a veto by Governor Asa Hutchinson of its new punitive bill banning any and all therapy for transgender youth in the state. The vote in their Senate was 75 to 25; their House voted 25-8.

Hutchinson, no friend of the LGBTQ community in the first place, complained that the law steps over the line: it contains no "grandfather" provision for transgender persons who have already begun treatment, and it is antithetical to the theory of small government.

Perhaps the governor fails to appreciate that "small government" ideals appeal only to conservatives who want the government out of their own business. Conservatives have been only too happy to have government intervene in the affairs of other people.

But what really bothers me most is how easily I could simply repurpose this cartoon to be about state governments in South and North Dakota, Mississippi, Montana, West Virginia, Kansas, Maine, North Dakota, Iowa, North and South Carolina, Tennessee — and I haven't even gotten to the states that do have Major League Baseball franchises.

1919's Rash of Lynching

Mercurial President Donald Trump brought up the subject of lynching earlier this week, so Sweptback Saturday takes the occasion to travel just slightly over a century into history to a time when lynching was running rampant in the U.S.

The Chicago race riots that we discussed here in August were just one episode out of many that would lead to a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. The "Red Summer" continued well into the fall; the entire nation would be shocked by a mob riot in Omaha, Nebraska, on Sunday, September 28.

"Held Up!" by John H. Cassel in New York Evening World,  September 30, 1919

A white mob set fire to the Douglas County Courthouse and hanged Mayor Edward Smith from traffic light, demanding that he release to them one William Brown, a black man accused of attacking a white woman. Authorities released some hundred or so prisoners being held at the four-story courthouse onto the roof. According to some accounts, the mob pushed past Sheriff Clark and seized Brown in a corridor; Clark's own account to the press was that other prisoners pushed Brown off the roof into the mob below.

"Dawn in Omaha" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October, 1919

Mayor Smith ended up in the hospital, and Brown ended up in the morgue, shot twice, hanged, and burned. (There are photographs, if you can stomach them, but I will neither include nor link to them here.) Army units under General Leonard Wood were sent to Omaha to restore order, effecting an undeclared martial law over the next two weeks.

But the most deadly riot of the Red Summer was in Elaine, Arkansas two days after the Omaha lynching, when whites panicked over a rumor that blacks were planning an armed insurrection. As many as 237 African-American residents of the small town may have been killed by the white mob. As a further injustice, 72 African-Americans were tried and convicted of murder, and twelve of them sentenced to death.

"Just a Nightmare" by Claude Shafer in Cincinnati Post,  October, 1919

What strikes me about the editorial cartoons I came across about these race riots and lynchings is that so many of them completely overlook the racial component central to the violence. Even John Cassel, whose cartoons praising African-American soldiers I've pointed out before, ignores the issue of race in his cartoon about the Omaha riot.

To some extent, that is because there were at the same time a number of workers' strikes beset by violence (largely blamed on the strikers, although the brutal tactics of law enforcement public and private certainly contributed to that mayhem). And the issues overlap: the official inquiry into the Elaine lynchings admitted no African-American testimony, but historians agree that there was no plot of armed revolt. Rather, black sharecroppers were attempting to organize union-style for more equitable terms from their white landowners. Elsewhere, employers brought in African-Americans as "scab" laborers during labor strikes, only exacerbating racial animosity.

Conflating a host of issues, Sidney Greene, below, cites "mob maniacs" as just the bottom-most of many things which might embarrass the U.S. in front of visiting royalty.

"Hide These 'Sights' from the Belgian King" by Sidney Greene in New York Evening Telegram, October 3, 1919

Not surprisingly, the one cartoon I've found specifying race as its topic was by an African-American cartoonist, Leslie Rogers of the Chicago Defender.

"Sightseeing" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, October, 1919

For what it's worth, not every lynch mob resulted in mass murder. On Hallowe'en, hundreds of white citizens of Corbin, Kentucky, sparked by a report of a robbery, forced every black resident they could find in town out of their homes and into a train bound for Knoxville.

Rattling off a list of other lynchings in a October 1, 1919 editorial, the Philadelphia Public Ledger gave this mealy-mouthed sort-of condemnation of one of them:

"In Mt. Holly, N.J., there is talk of lynching a negro who attacked a white woman. If anything justifies a lynching, it is the crime with which this negro is charged. But nothing justifies a lynching. Lynching may be too good for the criminal. It is the damnable effect that it has on the mob and the reaction on the country at large that make it wholly bad."

"Oh, Little Brother" by Gaar Williams in Indianapolis News, October, 1919

Sen. John Sharp Williams (D-MS) leapt to the defense of the lynch mobs, harrumphing,

"In all the debates we have had here over these race disturbances, no mention has been made of the fact that they had, in most instances, their inception in attempts by negro men to violate white women. I will go as far as any man along the path of peace, and I will arbitrate any dispute which I think can be settled by peaceful means, but when it comes to a man regardless of his color, violating women, I surrender him to the first crowd."

As shocking as Senator Williams's statement is today, I suspect that the "attempts by negro men to violate white women" that incensed him and his mobs would elicit from even the most hypersensitive of today's #MeToo warriors a hesitant "Is that all?"

"At the Other End of the Lynchers' Rope" by J. N. "Ding" Darling in New York Tribune, October 3, 1919

Consider also that, as a later grand jury in the Omaha case found, "Several reported assaults on white women had actually been perpetrated by whites in blackface," charging that figures in organized crime "premeditated and planned" the rioting. Their evidence included police reports that at least one white rioter was arrested wearing blackface.

Yet no white person was ever found guilty of participation in the riot.

Hi Y'All, Lawrence County

The cartoon I published a couple weeks ago of Cthulhu drowning his sorrows in a beer appears to have caught on — at least moreso than most of my work. I had a request from the Independent Voter Network to use it, which I referred to my distributor at Q Syndicate since it was a current cartoon (and it did show up at ivn.us on Hallowe'en).

It showed up on my Facebook feed, as an October 26 post from someone unfamiliar to me that had subsequently been shared by someone on my friends list — and, as it turns out, by at least 2,975 other people.

That's a couple thousand more friends than I have, and it prompted me to do a quick Google search. I found the cartoon in the usual places: my own site, the AAEC page, subscribing publications, political message boards and such.

And one surprise: The Times Dispatch of Lawrence County, Arkansas.

Screen grab from yesterday.

Lawrence County is in the northeast corner of the Toothpick State, with a population of about 17,000. It is home to Williams Baptist College in Walnut Ridge, a town whose official web page boasts that "Residents can enjoy the rural charm of a farming community with its winding roads and fields farmed for generations." County residents voted 72% to 22% for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton last year.

In short, not the typical publication to carry a gay left-wing cartoonist from Wisconsin.

But then, this cartoon wasn't skewering any particular politician by name, so I haven't had a flood of messages about how I'm a biased librul godless pervert heathen headed straight for aitch-ee-double-Toothpick State.

Some people do pick up on my original intent, though. Some guy objected to the cartoon on the Independent Voter Network's Facebook page, complaining, "Where were these cartoons when the Muslim Obama was in office! Independent??? Just a closet democrat!" So there's still time for the good citizens of Lawrence County to get their dander up.

Q Toon: Gonna Party Like It's 1921

I figured that enough of the weekly papers which run my cartoon are going to run "double issues" this week (meaning that they won't publish next week), that their editors will be looking for something with a year-end theme.

Donald Berzilius Trump is assembling an incredibly right-wing cabinet. Recent Democratic presidents have always felt compelled to include some Republicans in their cabinet; Barack Obama named three to his inaugural cabinet and was vilified as a ultra-liberal extremist anyway. Even George W. Bush named a token Democrat as Secretary of Transportation. There's no seat at the table in Trump's White House for anyone but Republican ideologues, tycoons and racists, however.

But since I draw for the LGBT press, I couldn't draw this cartoon without sounding the alarm for the future of marriage equality.

If you think my concern is unwarranted, consider all the efforts in Republican statehouses to legislate marriage inequality. In Arkansas, the state Supreme Court ruled that while husband and wife are both recorded as parents to a child, even if one of them is not related by blood, same-sex parents are not.

Several states have put forth so-called religious liberty laws to the effect that anyone can discriminate against same-sex couples as long as they claim religious belief as their excuse. And by anyone, the U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that that means any corporation: your employer can refuse family leave, your insurer can refuse to cover your spouse; your hospital can refuse to let one spouse make decisions on behalf of (or even visit) an unconscious spouse.

It's not just wedding cakes, and with no check on their power, Republicans have promised that it's about to go national.

Q Toon: Keeping the Kids Safe

It should be noted that the state legislator in this week's cartoon is begin facetious from Frame One. The statute of limitations on Former Speaker Hastert's alleged sexual assaults expired decades ago. He was convicted of circumventing banking rules in order to pay hush money to one of his victims. He paid $1.7 million to a student whose groin he barely remembers having merely brushed in order to treat a pulled muscle, if you buy his defense.

Then there is the weird story of the leather recliner Hastert positioned in the locker room so that he could watch his wrestlers while they showered. Don't bother trying to imagine how he explained that expense to the school administration; school athletic departments have always gotten considerably more deference than, say, the English department.

Nevertheless, the deal with the recliner was pretty ballsy. I remember that after gym class at my junior high school in the 1970's, we had to parade through a shower room, towels held up above the spray, while the gym teacher stood on an raised platform enclosed by a wall that came up about his chest-level in the center of the shower room, watching to make sure that we were actually getting wet or something.

There were whispers that our coach was enjoying the show more than necessary, but at least he had to stand up. He wasn't relaxing comfortably in an overstuffed La-Z-Boy.

✒

Coming back to the present, Rep. Jeremy Durham (R-Natcherly), a vocal co-sponsor of the Bathroom Bill speeding through Tennessee's state legislature, has just been found to have a habit of sexually harassing women who have the misfortune to work in his vicinity. The allegations are so numerous that the Secretary of State has issued an official warning that "Representative Durham's alleged behavior may pose a continuing risk to unsuspecting women who are employed by or interact with the legislature." The Speaker of the Tennessee House Beth Harwell has banished Durham from his office, exiling him to an office across the street.

No word on whether he gets to take his La-Z-Boy recliner with him.

Q Toon: Need for Speed

North Carolina is the latest state where lawmakers are pushing legislation to overrule municipal ordinances protecting LGBT rights.This is in response to LGBT protections passed by the Charlotte city council in February.

As in Arkansas, Michigan and other states where these laws have been proposed (by some weird coincidence, always by Republicans), the argument is often that having different standards from one locality to another is confusing; therefore, the government mandates conformity to the most negligible level of protections as the statewide rule.

Q Toon: Office Space Cadet

Campaigning at Drake University last week, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) was asked whether it was right for someone to be fired from their job because he/she is gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered. Paul responded by lamenting that LGBT people these days have the audacity to be open and honest about their families and relationships:

“I think, really, the things you do in your house, just leave those in your house and they wouldn’t have to be a part of the workplace, to tell you the truth.”

Given the extent to which today's employers think they have a right to know everything about every job applicant and employee (and certainly Mr. LibertariAyn Rand Paul wouldn't want to prohibit employers from requiring you to give them the password to your Facebook account), Paul certainly hasn't given any thought to what it would take to "leave those in your house."

Face it, Senator, LGBT citizens just want the same rights every other American has to surrender their privacy.

Paul has since attempted to walk back his comments by saying that, sure, it's wrong to fire someone for being LGBT, but it's even wronger for the fired person to take the ex-employer to court, and wrongest for the federal government to protect LGBT rights in the first place. He thinks these things ought to be left to state legislatures -- where some people want your boss to be able to require you to friend him on social media.

If Paul still sees nothing wrong with that, all I have to say is: Ophthalmologist, heal thyself!

Q Toon: Kenya Matata

President Obama visited Eastern Africa during this past week, and during a press conference with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta in Nairobi, he was asked about gay rights, which very few African countries respect. He answered:

"If somebody is a law abiding citizen who is going about their business and working in a job and obeying the traffic signs and doing all the other things that good citizens are supposed to do, and not harming anybody, the idea that they are going to be treated differently or abused because of who they love is wrong. Full stop. ... When you start treating people differently not because of any harm they're doing anybody but because they're different, that's the path whereby freedoms begin to erode and bad things happen."

Under Kenyan law, sexual activity between men is illegal and may result in a prison sentence of up to 14 years. Kenyatta, described by Politico as "clearly uncomfortable, fidgeting at the podium,"  dismissed the topic entirely: "The issue of gay rights is a non-issue."

Given recent events in marriage equality in the United States and the horrible record in many African countries on LGBT rights, that the topic would come up during President Obama's visit was widely anticipated. A planned naked protest against Obama for his pro-gay stand had been canceled hours before his visit. Organizers claimed that 3,600 had signed up to participate in the protest before some unidentified 2:00 in the morning caller persuaded them to cancel.

One shudders to imagine such a protest in this country. I don't want to see thousands of naked Kentucky county clerks, Alabama judges, Mississippi cake bakers, Arkansas florists, Texas legislators, Scott Lively, Franklin Graham and Maggie Gallagher flapping and flopping their way up Pennsylvania Avenue, do you?

Q Toon: Remember Me?

Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL) was indicted last Thursday, accused of  paying someone known as "Individual A" $3.5 million in hush money over a case of sexual misconduct with a male student when he was a high school wrestling coach in Yorkville, Illinois.

Hastert is not accused of the actual sexual misconduct, the statute of limitations having expired long ago. Instead, he is accused of lying to the FBI about why the former congressman began making large cash withdrawals from his financial accounts in 2010; he had claimed it was due to a lack of confidence in the banking system and that he was keeping the cash.

Making huge cash withdrawals isn't illegal, but banks are required to file a "currency transaction report" on all cash transactions exceeding $10,000 thanks to the Patriot Act, which Hastert had taken credit for crafting and passing in a 2011 interview.

My cartoon, riffing on a 2014 appearance by Hastert on C-SPAN currently gone viral, deals less with the idea of the Patriot Act coming around to bite Hastert in the butt than his voting record on LGBT issues. In addition to Hastert's antigay votes on marriage equality and employment non-discrimination, I could also have included his stance on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.

In case you are too young to remember, the Republicans in Congress had forced the appointment of a special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, to look into Whitewater, an Arkansas property scheme in which the Clintons had lost money. Finding nothing impeachment-worthy there, Mr. Starr moved on to investigate charges by Paula Jones that Mr. Clinton had sexually assaulted her while Governor of Arkansas. Finding insufficient evidence of wrong-doing there, too, Mr. Starr proceeded to investigate an apparently consensual extra-marital affair between the President and Monica Lewinsky, a 20-something intern at the White House.

Mr. Starr subpoenaed the President to testify under oath, wherein President Clinton flatly denied the affair. Physical evidence contradicted the President's testimony, so the House voted to impeach. Not over the sex stuff, Republicans protested, but over the perjury.

"Mr. President, I am saddened that there is clear and convincing evidence that the President lied under oath, obstructed justice, and abused the powers of his office in an attempt to cover up his wrong-doing. I regret that the President's behavior puts me in the position of having to vote for these Articles of Impeachment and to pass this matter on to the U.S. Senate for final judgment. ... In this nation, all men are created equal. Simply put, the President in our representative democracy is not a sovereign who is above the law. Tomorrow, we shall pass a difficult vote. The President's inability to abide by the law, the Constitution, and my conscience have all led me to the sound conclusion that impeachment articles must be passed." — Rep. Dennis Hastert, in the Well of the House, December 18, 1998

It is ironic, then, that Hastert, is now charged not with whatever sexual shenanigans he engaged in at Yorkville High, but with lying under oath and paying Individual A off in an effort to evade justice.

✒

A propos of our discussion the other day of racial and gender diversity in cartoon characters, I blew an opportunity to be ethnically inclusive when I changed the C-SPAN interviewer from Pedro Echevarria to Steve Scully. Mea culpa.

Q Toon: Patchwork Uniformity

This week's cartoon was touched off by Republicans' proposed measure in Michigan to nullify local anti-discrimination ordinances, and a similar measure which went into law in Arkansas.

LGBT activists breathed a sigh of relief when a provision that could have invalidated all 38 LGBT inclusive anti-discrimination ordinances in Michigan was removed from the final version of a bill passed 11-7 by the House Commerce and Trade Committee May 19. The Republican sponsors of the original version of the "Local Government Employer Mandate Prohibition Act" claimed they were simply trying to unify employment practices across the state.

In the final version passed out of committee, communities will not be allowed to pass ordinances regarding wages, benefits or working conditions in their towns. 

Paul Berge Q Syndicate✒May 21, 2015 EditorialCartoonists.com

I apologize, dear reader, that this cartoon works a whole lot better in a newspaper, which is easy to turn upside down, than on a desktop computer, which isn't, or a smart phone, which will keep trying to turn the image right-side up. (At last, an advantage dead trees have over live circuits!)

This cartoon is probably the result of my having recently read a mention of The Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo. The six-panel cartoon by Gustave Verbeck (starting in 1903) was ingeniously designed so that the second half of the story was told when you turned the page up-side down.

Verbeck's reader had to overlook the fact that Old Man Muffaroo's legs were extending up from the top of Little Lady Lovekins's hat, or that a stream the heroes had waded across in panel #3 was flowing through the sky in panel #10. But it was a weekly tour de force nevertheless: a story aimed at children but presented in a way that adults could appreciate.

At first, I was going to have a human character in the cartoon, talking out of his ass, as it were --  one of the preliminary sketches is at the top of this post. In the end (ahem), I decided that some of my editors endeavor to run respectable news publications in which exposed derrières belong in the club photos and phone sex ads in the back pages, not the editorial page. So I went with an elephant instead -- the traditional symbol of the Republican Party, whence these laws superseding local ordinances on everything from the above mentioned labor conditions to gun safety and fracking bans originate these days.

With an elephant instead of a human, the aspect of talking out of one's ass still remains, but not quite so explicitly that the League of Perpetually Offended Complainers should catch it.

Q Toon: Proportional Response

Usually, I try not to draw about the same topic two weeks in a row, but some stories just stick to the news like gum to a shoe.

Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) made news a couple weeks ago when he penned a letter to Iran lecturing them that the U.S. Senate would have to ratify whatever treaty the Obama administration and the European Union worked out with them, broadly hinting that of course, it won't. He was on CNN's Situation Room to discuss his strategy to blitzkrieg Iran into submission when host Wolf Blitzer asked him about the so-called "religious liberty" bill that Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson had sent back to the state legislature after the furor over Indiana's RLPA.

Apparently eager to steer the conversation back to his Iran talking points, Cotton pooh-poohed LGBT concerns about religious liberties legislation:

“I also think it’s important that we have a sense of perspective about our priorities. In Iran they hang you for the crime of being gay. ...”

Q Syndicate✒Apr 9, 2015

Of course, gays' and lesbians' lives and liberties are threatened in many other countries besides Iran -- in some cases at the urging of American activists who purport to be Christians.

I should note here that Cotton did in fact acknowledge that Christians don't have it easy in Iran, either, continuing,

“They’re currently imprisoning an American preacher for spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ in Iran. We should focus on the most important priorities our country faces right now, and I would say that a nuclear armed Iran, given the threat that it poses to the region and to our interests in the region and American citizens, is the most important thing that we’d be focused on.”

Cotton was not, however, suggesting that the plight of that American preacher (or, indeed, of the 150 Christian students slaughtered at Garissa University College in Kenya -- or the 14 killed in the Lahore, Pakistan, church bombing; or the 21 Copts beheaded in Libya;  or in Nigeria; or in Syria... ) was comparable to the gross human rights tragedy of having to play piano for a gay wedding.

Q Toon: Dogpatch, Arkansas

Q Syndicate✒Feb 26, 2015

Last week, the Arkansas legislature passed SB202, a bill by State Senator Bart Hester (R-Benton Co.) nullifying any local anti-discrimination ordinances which include LGBT Arkansans.

Arkansas on Monday banned local governments from expanding anti-discrimination protections to include sexual orientation and gender identity, becoming the second state to adopt a measure opponents call a thinly-veiled move to discriminate against gays and lesbians. ... The measure was introduced in reaction to a Fayetteville ordinance that voters repealed in December expanding the city's anti-discrimination protections. Eureka Springs in northwest Arkansas enacted a similar measure earlier this month, and Little Rock elected officials are weighing expanding that city's discrimination protections.

Sen. Hester is one of those Big Government Conservatives; he previously co-authored a bill requiring houses of worship to admit handguns into their sanctuaries. He claimed that SB202 was needed to prevent a patchwork quilt of anti-discrimination laws hindering business and industry, in spite of the thundering silence on that count from business and industry.

The Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce told ThinkProgress last week, “We have no position on that piece of legislation.” Walmart, which is based in Arkansas and has corporate LGBT protections, only spoke out on the bill Monday evening, mere hours before it was to become law without Hutchinson’s signature. Tyson Foods, another prominent Arkansas business that protects its gay employees, remained silent on the legislation.

Governor Asa Hutchinson (R-Of Course) expressed "concerns about the loss of local control," but allowed the bill to go into effect without his signature anyway.

Meanwhile, a similar pro-discrimination law is already on the books in Tennessee, and another has been proposed in West Virginia.

I'd Only Need to Update the Headlines

Some cartoons, sadly, never get old.

I drew this particular one 13 years ago this month.

This week's cartoon

The chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party, Doyle Webb, has warned Republican groups that "an openly gay woman" could serve as chair of the state Budget Committee if Democrats achieve a majority the state House of Representatives.

He charges that as chair of the committee, state Rep. Kathy Webb, D-Little Rock, (no relation) would "be in a position to influence a change in what has been established as traditional Arkansas values such as marriage between one man and one woman," in Doyle Webb's words.

The other person in this cartoon is a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, Kim Hendren, who has apologized for referring to New York Democrat Chuck Schumer as "that Jew" in a campaign appearance. (Hendren claims that he momentarily couldn't remember Schumer's name.)