The Long Road to Overnight Victory: Part III

Part 3: The Republicans Don't

In today's Walkback Wednesday feature, we look at the Republican party's role in doing everything possible to thwart marriage equality, marriage equivalence, marriage parity, marriage approximation, and on and on and on.

Once the federal "Defense of Marriage Act" was passed in 1996, battles over marriage equality were mainly fought on the state and local level. Nationally, it was a big issue for the religious right, but as for congressmen and senators, it was just one more component of an antigay agenda along with keeping gays out of the military and the Boy Scouts, and making sure we couldn't adopt children. Oh, and there was impeaching President Clinton to keep Republicans busy.

There are a few antigay politicians in the above cartoon from January, 1998: Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), Pat Buchanan, Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA), and House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) are closest to the foreground. Barr was the author of the DOMA, although he would repudiate it as presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party ten years after this cartoon was drawn.

With the election (by five lawyers) of a president who was a friend of the religious right, Republicans continued their pushback against marriage equality. When he came up for reelection, George W. Bush, with his Brain Karl Rove (and gay quisling Ken Mehlman) needed an issue to fire up his base, and Republicans were ready, willing and eager to run with it:

A more liberal Republican, namely California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who didn't have to worry as much about appealing to Christian conservatives as Republicans who might aspire to the highest office in the land do, dared to warm to the idea of domestic partnerships. But that was about as far as it went.

Schwarzenegger, however, was pretty much an anomaly in the Republican party. He was never going to run for office outside of California, and Republicans were relieved just to have one of their own in charge of a solidly blue state, so he didn't have to toe the GOP's hard-core antigay line. The party's presidential hopefuls last time around, on the other hand, were not at all shy in that regard.

It didn't take much to remind LGBT voters that while it didn't make any difference which Republican ended up getting nominated for president, it makes a world of difference who sits in the Oval Office when the election is over.

Q Toon: Perry v. Schwarzenegger

The two people in the lower right of this cartoon are Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage and Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association, two anti-marriage activists. This is the second time I've drawn Gallagher in a cartoon, and it's because her troll-like looks are fun to draw.

Once U.S. District court Judge Vaughn Walker issued his strongly worded decision declaring California's Proposition 8 unconstitutional, the strategy of the anti-marriage forces was revealed. Having utterly failed to present any legal defense of Prop 8 in the court, Maggie Gallagher, Tim Wildmon, and the Faux News network immediately began their appeal to the phobias and prejudices of the general public.

The religious right has been able to pass these measures in nearly every state where they've tried because they find it easy to use fear and innuendo to convince a majority to trample the rights of a minority. Then they squawk and scream when judges refer to the law and constitution, not popular opinion and the Pentateuch, to find that the minority deserves protection.

Tim Wildmon has even gone so far as to propose that Judge Walker be impeached -- I guess on the grounds that if Walker is openly gay, he should be disqualified from ruling whether gays have a right to marry. (By the same logic, a judge who is married or engaged to be married ought also to be disqualified. So should a judge who openly professes a faith with a stand either way on the question of marriage equality.)

Unless the right manages to push through a constitutional amendment replacing the judiciary branch with popular referenda (which might actually be easy to accomplish in California), Perry v. Schwarzenegger will be appealed through the court system, and the appeals will have to concern themselves with Judge Walker's ruling itself, not a reintroduction of the allegations that same-sex couples are unfit to be parents, or that reproduction is the sine qua non of marriage, or that gay sex is nasty icky poopy.

An aside: if you wouldn't mind having your sex acts described in exact detail in a court of law, you're probably doing it wrong.

Da Do Ron Ron

One of the most difficult questions I ever have to answer is "How long does it take you to do a cartoon?"

A cartoon such as last week's syndicated one, showing from a fair height two buses and an ambulance stranded in a vast wilderness alongside a lonely road, took fairly little time to draw. It was just a matter of getting the vehicles drawn in the same perspective as each other and adding a few faces that were too small to allow for any actual detail. I probably spent more time on the lettering of the balloon than on the rest of the drawing. Maybe an hour for the whole thing.

But that doesn't count the hard part of the cartoon: coming up with the idea in the first place.

I had decided early on that I wanted to do a cartoon about California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's line item budget veto slashing the state Office of AIDS budget. The obvious idea for the topic would have been to depict him as the Terminator. That idea has been done before -- hundreds of times in one fashion or another since he first declared his candidacy for the office -- so I quickly rejected it. But what else to do?

I thought long and hard about it. During some of that time, any bystander might have mistakenly concluded that I wasn't doing anything. Or that I was mindlessly surfing the internet. Or napping.

Sitting around appearing to do nothing, surfing the internet, or napping for hours on end does not do much toward maintaining domestic tranquility at home, so I tried thinking up the cartoon idea while doing other things that needed to get done, such as housecleaning and mowing the lawn. Somehow, actually accomplishing something seems always to be thoroughly detrimental to germinating a cartoon idea.

I noticed about halfway through mowing the lawn that I had spent 20 minutes or so thinking of nothing but the lyrics to a nonsense song from the musical Hair. It's a pleasant enough tune, but there was no way it was going to be helpful in coming up with a cartoon about slashing funds to budget California's Office of AIDS.

That's when it hit me how much easier song writing must be than political cartooning.

A song writer can get away with writing "Glippety glub gloopy nibby nabby noopy La la la lo lo Sabba sibby sabba nooby abba nabba le le lo lo tooby ooby walla nooby abba naba" and still have a hit on his hands forty years later. "Oh wah diddy, diddy dum diddy doo" remains in the top 100 hits of all time. All the Police wanted to say to you was "De do do do, de da da da," and fans ate it up.

If I tried to get away with that sort of thing, 90% of my readers would respond, "I don't get it." (The other 10% would assume I was ripping off Zippy the Pinhead.) Editors would drop my feature faster than a flaming porcupine.

Considering how the job prospects for editorial cartooning get worse and worse with every passing day, how much harder do you suppose it really is to be a song writer? How much time does it take to write one stupid song, anyway?

All the doo dah day.

This Week's Cartoon

I really, really, really did NOT want to draw a cartoon depicting California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator for slashing the budget of the state Office of AIDS this week. It was mighty difficult to get that cliche out of my head, though. Here's what I eventually came up with instead...

Psst.... there will be a second cartoon this week.

Marriage Quotations

“I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman.”

--Arnold Schwarzenegger, on Sean Hannity's radio program, August 27, 2003 (making as much sense as the right-wingers who argue that gays and lesbians have the same right to marriage as straight people have, as long as we marry people of the opposite sex).

"My aunt married a white man in the 1950s when their marriage was illegal in half the states of this country. Indeed, my uncle, had he taken his wife across the wrong state line, would have been guilty of a criminal violation. It seems to me that if people want to marry a person of a different race that’s no different than somebody wanting to marry someone of the same sex. And, indeed, we should be celebrating the fact that these people are talking about forming solid relationships, families, because families, in the end, will keep the community stable and are the basis upon which our country has been built and will survive."

--former Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, D-IL, at the MSNBC presidential candidates' debate Nov. 24, 2003

"Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of marriage. It will destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth."

--James "Focus on the Family" Dobson, campaigning for Senate candidate Tom Coburn at Oklahoma Christian University, Oct. 22, 2004

“Some believe that gay marriage is our most pressing issue because the Bible tells them so. Of course, the Bible says some unusual things, for example, that it’s permissible to stone to death adulteresses but not adulterers. Is that so state legislatures can maintain a quorum?”

--Henry Riekert, a columnist writing in the Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader, April 19, 2004