Q Toon: AG Stands for Almira Gulch

Impeached Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton isn't going to let a little thing like his state's borders stop him from going after transgender kids and their families.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is requesting medical records of Texas youth who have received gender-affirming care from a Georgia telehealth clinic, marking at least the second time he’s sought such records from providers in another state.

The clinic, QueerMed, confirmed on Friday morning that they received the request. QueerMed said it stopped servicing youth in Texas after the state banned transition-related care last year. The clinic’s founder said the attorney general requested information about patients dating back to Jan. 1, 2022, before the ban took effect.

The clinic said that Paxton asked for private information about Texas residents who were provided with telehealth care in Texas before the ban, and residents provided with care outside of Texas after the ban. The request, they said, nearly mirrors one the attorney general sent to Seattle Children’s Hospital last year.

Paxton asked Seattle Children’s for a variety of patient information, including the number of Texas children they have treated, medications prescribed to children, the children’s diagnoses and the name of Texas laboratories where tests for youth are administered.

In response to that request, known as a civil investigative demand, Seattle Children’s sued the Texas Office of the Attorney General in December.

QueerMed confirmed that Paxton sent his request to them on Nov. 17, the same day that Seattle Children’s received the similar demand for documents. QueerMed received the request Dec. 7, due to mail delays. Its receipt of the letter was first reported by The Houston Chronicle on Friday morning.

I'm going to level with you here: I'm mighty sick and tired of having to come up with new things to say about Republicans' psychotic vendetta against transgender citizens. You think you're tired of hearing about Taylor Swift showing up at every Kansas City Chiefs game? Puh-leeze. Republicans launched this crusade over a decade ago, and now it's everywhere you look.

They started by frightening their impressionable minions with fanciful tales of hairy, brutish men in dresses lurking in women's bathrooms. Then they moved on to keeping transgender girls out of locker rooms, out of pools, out of sports. Now they're attacking transgender people's rights to vote, to work, to drive, to cross state lines, to be called by their own names. Above all, they keep passing laws to criminalize transgender persons' health care.

And yet it's those whiny MAGA snowflakes who think they're the ones someone is trying to "erase."

Hammerin' Hank

 “God put you here for a reason. And the reason he put you here is not for you to stand still. He put you here to make you understand that ... you gotta do all you can to try and make things better for other people.” — Henry Aaron

Q Toon: Censor Sensibility

Political Correctness hasn't gone away; now that the evangelical right-wingers are in charge of it, PC is stronger than ever.

I drew a picture of Donald Trump glowering down upon CDC chair Brenda Fitzgerald (R-GA) and her press gaggle, but I strongly suspect that Mike Pence, Ben Carson, and the other official representatives of the so-called Christian Right have more to do with the banning of the Seven Dirty Words at the Centers for Disease Control. Sure, Trump is into marketing, but he's more concerned with enriching the rich and diverting Robert Mueller's attention than calling a fetus a "pre-born baby."

I shudder to think what their preferred term for "transgender" is.

All of the Corrupt Trump Administration is fully behind scrapping anything science-based or evidence-based. They have their faith-based belief in clean coal, trickle-down economics, no-risk deregulation of industry, defunding public education, and the up-side of hastening Armageddon.

Happy holidays!

Q Toon: Deal Or No Deal?

As a cartoonist, I love sitting down to my drawing board when I have a subject who is ripe for caricature.

No, I don't mean Georgia Governor Nathan Deal. He's got a face like a bowl of grits.

I'll probably never have another reason to draw Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank, but his face has all the definition a caricaturist could ever want. If Hollywood wanted to cast someone to play the president, generalissimo, or financier of Greece, Italy, or a Latin American country circa 1972, his face would be perfect.

In case you haven't been following Georgia politics lately, the state legislature has passed what they call a "Free Exercise Protection Act," which doesn't do anything to ensure the safety of weight lifters and joggers. Rather, it purports to protect discrimination against same-sex couples by anyone who professes "sincerely held religious beliefs" as the basis for denying housing, employment, or other services to people they don't like.

Blank's Atlanta Falcons have been pushing for a new football stadium in the hopes of hosting the Superbowl soon after it is finished, but now the NFL has announced that the league will not site any Superbowl in the state of Georgia if Deal signs the Free Exercise Protection Act into law.

Considering that, Blank, not surprisingly, opposes the Georgia bill.

"I strongly believe a diverse, inclusive and welcoming Georgia is critical to our citizens and the millions of visitors coming to enjoy all that our great state has to offer,” Blank said in a statement. “House Bill 757 undermines these principles and would have long-lasting negative impact on our state and the people of Georgia."

Disney, film production companies, tech firms, and even Coca-Cola — Coca-Cola! — have also threatened to pull out of the state over FEPA.

Governor Deal has until May 3 to decide whether sincerely held religious beliefs are trumped by sincerely held economic ones.

This Week's Q Syndicate cartoon

Window Media LLC / Unite Media suddenly shuttered its LGBT newspapers last week, including the 40-year-old Washington Blade, our newspaper of record in the nation's capital.

The good news is that the staff of the affected publications have busted their buns to put out new product under new flags.