Q Toon: She's Got a Little List

 

The Holy Land is erupting in war, bringing horror, misery, and death to innocents of all ages on both sides.

After weeks of dysfunction, Requblicans in the House have finally found a Speaker who is acceptable to both the plutocratic and fascist wings of the party. 

So naturally, my cartoon this week is based, loosely, on a weird little news story that broke while I was busy with the AAEC convention earlier this month.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) — An Alabama public library mistakenly added a children’s picture book to a list of potentially inappropriate titles because the author’s last name is “Gay,” the library’s director said.

Read Me a Story, Stella, a children’s picture book by Canadian author Marie-Louise Gay, was added to a list of books flagged for potential removal from the children’s section of the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library because of “sexually explicit” content.

But the book, which is about a pair of siblings reading together and building a dog house, should not have been on the list and was only added because of the keyword “gay,” Cindy Hewitt, the library’s executive director told AL.com on Sunday.

Once the library's ridiculous book censorship made news, the library sheepishly admitted that they had overreacted to a list of "explicit material" generated by AI (i.e., Alabama Intelligence). Their excuse was that they had merely erred on the side of hysteria.

No harm done, right?

Kirsten Brassard, Gay’s publicist at Groundwood Books, said the episode sends a “hateful message” coming from a public library,

“This proves, as always, that censorship is never about limiting access to this book or that one. It is about sending the message to children that certain ideas — or even certain people — are not worthy of discussion or acknowledgment or consideration,” Brassard told the news outlet.

It's not clear from the news accounts that I've read whether the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library even had Read Me a Story, Stella in the children's section in the first place, let alone whether anyone on the staff had ever read it. Perhaps, as a gesture of goodwill, they will now get themselves a copy.

No doubt with a "Parental Advisory" sticker plastered over the author's last name.

Q Toon: Unspeakable Acts

Oh, and of course, money.

A student group at West Texas A&M University planned to put on a drag show to raise funds for the Trevor Project, a charity that works to prevent LGBTQ+ suicides. Once upon a time and place, that would seem to be a laudable move, but not now and not in Texas.

WTA&MU President Walter Wendler banned the show with the novel argument that drag is “derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny” comparable to “blackface,” and that drag performers “stereotype women in cartoon-like extremes for the amusement of others and discriminate against womanhood.”

The student group moved their fund raiser off campus, and took the university to court. Unfortunately, that landed their case in the court of right-wing activist Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, appointed to the North Texas District Court by Donald Joffrey Trump in 2017.

Kacsmaryk found that drag is likely not protected expression under the First Amendment, but rather “vulgar and lewd” “sexualized conduct” that may be outlawed to protect “the sexual exploitation and abuse of children.” In short, he concluded that drag fails to convey a message, while explaining all the reasons why he’s offended by the message it conveys.

Your humble scribbler has drawn Mr. Kacsmaryk before. Last year, he found that health care professionals have every right to refuse to treat transgender patients. When Trump elevated him to the bench, he was policy advocate and deputy general counsel for First Liberty, a Talibangelist advocacy group based in Plano, Texas, to push that agenda exactly.

Kacsmaryk's ruling in this particular case is a sharp break from precedent: judges, even those in Red states such as Florida, Montana, and Tennessee, have ruled against state attempts to ban drag performances. The language of Kacsmaryk's ruling goes well beyond Wendler's feminist defense of his ban — perhaps that stuff was too woke for the judge — to assert his own revulsion against any departure from strict gender norms as the foundation of his bench-based legislation.

This case may well be appealed, perhaps all the way to the Supreme Court. If any of the right-wing activist justices with which the highest court in the land has been packed still profess any belief in constitutional originalism, I hope they remember that our Founding Fathers actually had a fondness for wigs and petticoats.

Q Toon: All Safe Zones Matter

 

My cartoon this week derives from a local news story here in Wisconsin, but it's a story that is being repeated with minor variations across the United States.

The Arrowhead Union High School Board in ruby-red Waukesha County, immediately west of Milwaukee, voted this month to forbid any teacher from posting that their classroom is an "LGBTQ+ Safe Space."

Board President Kim Schubert strongly opposed having safe space stickers placed on classroom doors. Having such imagery and messaging, she said, could stunt students’ development at pivotal points in their lives.
“I believe that safe spaces are, in fact, a detriment to our society,” Schubert said.

One of the TV news reports included a comment that "all areas of the school should be considered to be safe," which struck me as a particularly specious argument, given that our current right-wing Supreme Court believes that the First Amendment to the Constitution gives a Right to Refuse Service Card to anyone who claims a religious exemption from doing their job.

In other states, legislatures have passed laws requiring school staff to out LGBTQ+ students to their parents, regardless whether the home environment is a safe or unsafe space for LGBTQ+ kids. If kids in those states get kicked out of the home and into the streets, I guess that's just fine and dandy with the Republican legislators who don't have to worry about being kicked out of their safe seats.

So as not to appear to be singling LGBTQ+ youth out for abuse, the Arrowhead High board also forbade flags or other signage associated with Black Lives Matter, Latino/a heritage, and so forth (well, of course they would). They even included MAGA flags in the ban, although I don't think there is much danger of any kid in Waukesha being teased or beaten up for being a little Trumpster.

Elsewhere in Waukesha, the school district fired a first grade teacher who complained after the district told her she couldn't include the Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton duet "Rainbowland" in a school program.

The lyrics were widely believed to focus on acceptance, but district officials said they found the song "could be deemed controversial."  

Tempel raised her concerns on social media and received national attention. She told news outlets, including Wisconsin Public Radio, that the Muppets' "Rainbow Connection" was initially banned but later accepted after pushback from parents and the Alliance for Education in Waukesha. 

She also told WPR the district had not offered any specific reasons for the ban, but "the only common thread between those two songs was the word rainbow."

Waukesha school district officials claim they are just avoiding potential controversial subjects in their elementary schools, but don't be surprised if you see a choir of Waukesha schoolkids singing "The Donald Trump Song" at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next summer.

Q Toon: Texodus

Texas authorities are spewing hostility in all directions this year.

Where to start?

In a ruling issued September 7th, District Judge Reed O’Connor voided a mandate under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) which requires employers cover certain preventive healthcare products and services if these violate their religious beliefs. ...

In this instance, O’Connor is striking down an ACA requirement that insurers cover pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, which prevents transmission of the HIV virus, as well as contraception, the HPV vaccine (which prevents cervical cancer), and screenings and behavioral counseling for illicit drug use as well as sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). According to O’Connor’s opinion, “compulsory coverage for [these] services violates [employers’] religious beliefs by making them complicit in facilitating homosexual behavior and [illegal] drug use.”

O'Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, would no doubt approve of an employer with a religious belief in Zero Population Growth denying maternal, paternal, and family leave to its employees — to say nothing of suddenly converting to a religion that doesn't believe in modern medicine at all. Flipping off teh gays is just icing on the cake.

Moving along to panel two: 

On the morning of Aug. 30, a 13-year-old transgender boy was pulled out of class by his school’s administrators, his mother says. While his classmates continued their studies, he sat in a conference room at a Texas middle school where a Department of Family and Protective Services investigator began asking personal questions, court records state.

The reason: The state agency was probing his family following a February directive from Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to investigate the use of gender-affirming care in minors as child abuse, according to court documents.

The nearly hour-long interview touched on a range of personal topics — from the teen’s medical history to his gender dysphoria diagnosis to his suicide attempt years back, court records state. The interrogation left the boy — identified under the pseudonym Steve Koe — shaking and distressed, according to a signed declaration from his mother, named as Carol Koe.

And of course, Gov. Greg Abbott is forcibly busing immigrants to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, as if immigrants had not already been coming there:

Five more busloads of migrants who crossed the border from Mexico into Texas reached New York City on Wednesday as Gov. Greg Abbott escalated his feud with the city’s mayor with a victory lap op-ed in the New York Post.

The latest group of buses is the biggest to reach the East Coast city in one day since Abbott began the policy in early August, according to Fox News.

According to New York officials, Abbott even hired security guards to keep passengers from getting off his buses before they reached the Big Apple (although some did so anyway).

Whatever. All things being equal, there's a good chance that Coyote Abbott was doing some of those immigrants a huge favor. A free ride out of Howdy Arabia doesn't sound like such a terrible thing.

Q Toon: The Untied Methodist Church

Leaders of what has up to now been the United Methodist Church reached their breaking point this month. Conservatives, largely from Africa, the Philippines, and the southern U.S., have been horrified by acceptance by their liberal peers — mainly from North America and the British Isles — of marriage equality and the ordination of LGBTQ clergy.

A 16-member panel will now draw up a divorce settlement to present to Methodists' General Conference in Minneapolis this May. Conservatives are expected to break away to form their own denomination, taking a $25 million alimony payment on their way out. Everybody gets to keep their own churches, seminaries, ministries and property.

The devil, to coin a phrase, is in the details. Where congregations have a variety of viewpoints in the pews, there are bound to be some nasty fights, hurt feelings, and perhaps a few locks changed. Is Pastor Kim still covered under the old retirement plan? Who gets to keep the paten bought with Aunt Esther's memorial funds?

I'm being facetious when I suggest giving the judgmental, law-centric books of the Old Testament to one side and the Good News, salvation-laden books of the New Testament to the other.

You can think of the Old Testament as the part where God lays down the law and then gets pissed off by the children of Israel and sending plagues and serpents and Persians. Then Jesus shows up in the New Testament and hangs around with prostitutes, tax collectors, and fishermen, and sending them off to run errands on the Sabbath. His disciple Peter, the rock on whom Jesus's church would be built, dreams of eating bacon cheeseburgers and shrimp scampi.

But that's a simplistic summary of the Bible. The New Testament is also dominated by a convert from Judaism, Paul, who writes volumes to haul believers back to the Law of Deuteronomy. Pauline epistles to Timothy and the church in Rome preach against gay sex; Paul would rather that all believers abstain from sex, but he grudgingly cuts heterosexuals some slack.

Instead of divvying up the Bible by Testament, I should have granted the antigay conservatives custody of all the books of the Bible with an "O" in the title. That way, they get Deuteronomy and several of the Pauline epistles, as well as Exodus, Revelation and a smattering of doom-and-gloom prophets.

The liberals, sadly, would lose the Johannine gospel and epistles, but would keep the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Genesis, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, which are the only books of the Old Testament that get frequent usage in the Western Church anyway.

Perhaps the liberals and conservatives could agree on visitation rights on holidays.

Q Toon: Whoops for Wholeness

The Conversion Therapy scam lost another one of its founding fathers this summer. Hope for Wholeness founder McKrae Game publicly apologized on Facebook and in an interview with the (Charleston, South Carolina) Post and Courier this month for the damage the quack ministry had caused countless already conflicted and vulnerable gays and lesbians.

“Conversion therapy is not just a lie, but it’s very harmful, because it’s false advertising. ... I was a religious zealot that hurt people,” Game said in an interview. “People said they attempted suicide over me and the things I said to them. People, I know, are in therapy because of me. Why would I want that to continue?”

While condemning Wellness for Hope's practices, McKrae nevertheless believes that its Baptist construct could somehow serve as a community for people who believe “homosexuality is incongruent with their faith.” The Post and Courier article includes this response from a dissatisfied Hope for Wholeness client:

Josh Crocker, 32, a Greenville man who is gay and sought counsel from Hope for Wholeness as a college student in 2006 (known then as Truth Ministry), said that particular sentiment was troubling. There is no part of Hope for Wholeness, he added, that could be of benefit to anybody.
“For me, I just think that’s inadequate. ... I think he should be afforded the time and space to process all the things he needs to process and become who he is,” Crocker said in an interview, “but I’d love for him to apply that same passion he had for Hope for Wholeness ... to advocacy for the LGBTQ community ... and to dismantle conversion therapy and ex-gay ministries.”

Game founded Truth Ministry in 1999, after having "lived as a gay man for three years," according to the Hope for Wellness website. Now 51, he was fired from the program in 2017 and publicly declared himself gay this past June.

Game is hardly the only LGBTQ conversion therapist to discover that self-loathing is no way to live one's life. Sadly, the determination to force themselves to live heterosexual lives has left scores of ruined marriages in its wake.

[Mormon and conversion therapy advocate David] Matheson then confirmed [conversion therapy advocate Rich] Wyler’s assertions on Tuesday with a Facebook post of his own. “A year ago I realized I had to make substantial changes in my life. I realized I couldn’t stay in my marriage any longer. And I realized that it was time for me to affirm myself as gay,” he wrote.
Matheson, who was married to a woman for 34 years and is now divorced, also confirmed in an interview with NBC News that he is now dating men.

There was also ex-gay poster boy John Paulk, who appeared on the cover of Newsweek with his wife Anne back in August of 1998, only to transfer the prefix "ex-" from his gayness to his wife. Love in Action leader John Smid (the basis for the character of conversion therapist Victor Sykes in "Boy Erased") tried for 24 years to make a go of his mixed-sex marriage before admitting that he was not heterosexual and had "never met a man who experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual." Exodus International former President Alan Manning Chambers is apparently still married to his wife Marilyn, but now identifies as gay and, like the others, has publicly apologized to the LGBTQ community.

In spite of all this, and several states and cities officially banning conversion therapy, the ex-gay Christianist movement is reportedly making a comeback, according to the Washington Post. Jonathan Merritt interviewed for his report one new-wave ex-gay leader after another — Rosaria Champaigne Butterfield, Jackie Hill Perry, Matt Moore — who has married or become engaged to an opposite sex partner.

No doubt those couples will be very happy together.

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I've arranged the four panels of this week's cartoon in one column as an experiment in making multi-panel cartoons legible on teeny tiny phone screens. It wasn't drawn to accommodate the format, and I'm not particularly pleased with the result.

And that's as far as I'm willing to go. You want to read cartoons on your smart watch? Sorry, Dick Tracy.

Q Toon: Putting On The Fritts

On Sunday June 2, Grayson Fritts, founding pastor of All Scripture Baptist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, celebrated LGBTQ Pride Month with a sermon calling upon police to enforce biblical law that "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them" (Leviticus 20:13, KJV).

Fritts made several violent statements in his sermon, calling non-straight people "freaks, animals" and other names. He expressed the belief that it is the duty of police and the government to enforce anti-LGBTQ+ laws that are outlined in the Bible.
"Here's how it should work, it shouldn't work when we go out and we enforce the laws, because the Bible says the powers that be are ordained of God and God has instilled the power of civil government to send the police in 2019 out to these LGBT FREAKS and arrest them," he ranted. "Have a trial for them, and if they are convicted then they are to be put to death...do you understand that? it's a capital crime to be carried out by our government."
Fritts went on to say, "All the pride parades, man, hey call the riot teams, we got a bunch of 'em, get the paddy wagon out here, we got a bunch of 'em going to jail, we got a bunch of them we're gonna get convicted because they've got their pride junk on and they're professing what they are, they're a filthy animal."

One might dismiss this as the fulminations of one more Fred Phelps wannabe, but as it happens, Revrunt Fritts is also Deputy Fritts of the Knox County Sheriffs Department. Or, well, he was until video of his sermon got out.

Even as Knoxville Mayor Madeline Rogero and Sheriff Tom Spangler denounced Fritts's sermon and the District Attorney began a review of every investigation in which the former Deputy of the Month had been involved, Fritts doubled down in a follow-up sermon, telling his flock, "Just as God loves, God hates. ... Put homos to death!"

Shortly before that follow-up sermon, someone left an rainbow flag attached to a note outside the storefront church. The message read, "Dear Pastor Fritts, I don't know what happened to you, but I am so sorry. Love, Thy Neighbor."

Q Toon: Nunc Dimittis

Representatives of the worldwide United Methodist Church met in St. Louis, Missouri, February 23-26, and fought over competing resolutions to describe their church's attitude toward LGBTQ clergy and parishioners.

The conservative "Traditional Plan," which strengthened the church's prohibitions on "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" from ordination and mandated a year-long defrocking of any clergy who perform marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples or ordain LGBTQ clergy, passed in a 438-384 vote.

Delegates to the General Conference had earlier rejected a pro-LGBTQ "One Church Plan," which would have left those matters up to the conscience of individual clergy and congregations, by a vote of 374 to 449. A "Simple Plan" submitted by the Queer Clergy Caucus fared just as poorly.

Although many (but by no means all) Methodists in the United States now have liberal attitudes toward LGBTQ clergy and marriage equality, the majority of Methodists in the Third World do not. And it is that second group who are growing. 41% of the delegates were from outside the U.S., 30% from Africa alone.

"The old ladies in the villages, the old men in the villages, the young boys in the towns and villages, are all celebrating that the United Methodist Church has maintained its traditional view of the Bible," says Dr. Jerry Kulah of Liberia, general coordinator of the church's Africa Initiative. "Other denominations all across Africa are celebrating the United Methodist Church. That is the kind of euphoria being expressed right now across Africa."
Some United Methodists in Africa say they hear U.S. and European liberals lecturing to them on what positions they should take on issues of sexuality, family and marriage, and it strikes them as the latest example of a colonialist attitude.

As conservative congregations had threatened to leave the Methodist fold had the "One Church Plan" been adopted, there are now liberal American congregations and clergy (here's another) who no longer feel welcome. The General Assembly obligingly voted to accommodate their exit.

The UMC also voted to pass a disaffiliation petition, often called a “gracious exit” plan, to help the transition for those who felt they could not remain part of the denomination.
Though all UMC church property is deeded to the regional body, under the new legislation, churches with a two-thirds vote among professing members would be allowed to leave with their property after paying any pension liabilities and outstanding financial obligations.

Which is either an example of Christian charity, or the conservatives telling the liberals, "Hey, don't let the door ya on the way out!"

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Since this week's syndicated cartoon hinges on a very obscure reference, I'm going to just come right out and tell you that it's a play on words on a 1973 hymn by Brian Wren, "How Can We Name a Love" (written to the much older tune of "This Is My Father's World") included in the United Methodist Hymnal.

You'd have to ask a Methodist whether Methodist congregations ever sing it. I'm Lutheran, and it's not in any of my hymnals.

Q Toon: Room Catch-222

Religious conservatives are defending Karen Pence's decision to return to her job teaching art at Immanuel Christian School of Springfield, Virginia, a private school that bans LGBTQ students and staff. Mrs. Pence had taught there for twelve years while her husband was a Congressman, and their daughter Charlotte matriculated there.

(The sound you hear is that of the administrators of Immanuel Christian School scurrying to check whether the Bible approves of pre-marital matriculation.)

Defenders of the school and the Pences protest that the school has nothing against LGBTQ youth, it's just adhering to biblical principles and expects its straight boys and girls to do the same, too. Of course, little Valerie is not going to get kicked out of school merely for letting it slip that she has a boyfriend, but young Bradley will.

Since the students at Immanuel are all eighth grade and younger, most people would agree that they shouldn't be having sex at that age anyway. But Immanuel's restrictive policy goes further, extending to faculty, staff and parents.

Immanuel's admission policy requires the parents of students to be "born-again, Bible-believing" exemplars of right-wing Christian orthodoxy. Its "Parent Agreement" (revised last October 29) includes a clause reading:

"I understand that the school reserves the right, within its sole discretion, to refuse admission to an applicant or to discontinue the enrollment of a student if the atmosphere or conduct within a particular home, the activities of a parent or guardian, or the activities of the student are counter to, or in opposition to, the biblical lifestyle the school teaches. This includes, but is not limited to, contumacious behavior, divisive conduct, and participating in, supporting, or condoning sexual immorality, homosexual activity or bi-sexual [sic] activity, promoting such practices, or being able to support the moral principles of the school. (Lev. 20:13 and Romans 1:27.) I acknowledge the importance of a family culture based on biblical principles and embrace biblical family values such as a healthy marriage between one man and one woman."

Huffington Post's link to the school's employment application form is broken, but it's safe to assume that Immanuel's faculty (and their different-sex spouses) are also expected also to forswear "supporting, or condoning" homosexual or bisexual activity or marriage equality in any way.

So while Immanuel is legally protected by Virginia law to be as intolerant and bigoted as they want to be and there's nothing you can do about it, it's not intolerant on the part of the rest of us to observe that LGBTQ persons are never going to get fair treatment from Mrs. Pence's husband. Not without putting her out of a job.

Q Toon: Small Enough to Fit in Your Genes

You've probably heard by now that the Corrupt Trump Administration plans to issue an executive order decreeing that gender is an immutable characteristic decided in the womb. That is to say that the order will decree transgender individuals out of existence.

The New York Times learned of the ruling through a memo circulated in the Department of Human Services, home of the rabidly anti-lgbtq Roger Severino and the Religious Liberty University, er, Task Force. Should the proposal be approved by DHS, the Departments of Education, Justice and Labor are expected to follow suit.

This affects more than just telling transgender people to use the wrong bathroom. It could affect the kind of medical treatment transgender patients may receive under Medicaid (assuming there's anything left of Medicaid once Republicans are done with it), or which prisons transgender inmates might be sentenced to. It could even disenfranchise the whole lot of them by requiring them to try to vote using their dead names, if they can get past the poll worker convinced that Glen is trying to impersonate Glenda or vice versa.

Perhaps I'm being unfair linking this anti-transgender policy to Donald Berzilius Trump. It's of great interest to the theocrats in his administration — Severino, Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, and that ilk — but doesn't benefit Trump or his family personally.

On the other hand, it reverses a policy of the Obama administration, and Trump is more than eager to erase any vestige of his immediate predecessor, no matter what.

If Obama had built that wall across our southern border, Trump would be foaming at the mouth to tear it down.

Q Toon: Devil's Advocates

Buzz and Killer return this week with a question for our times.

The answer, of course, is that it would take an amendment to the Constitution, because Mr. Yiannopoulos was not born an American citizen.

Yiannopoulos, for those of you who have forgotten his fifteen minutes of fame last year, is a British-born, racist, Breitbartian provocateur whose schtick was getting invited by college Republican groups to speak on their campuses (campi?), usually provoking protests that prompted college administrators to cancel his speech. He is also gay, which made him a darling of the far right — their Token Homosexual — until he expressed his approval of pedophilia.

Now they have Kanye West, so as far as the Sinclair-Fox-Breitbart crowd is concerned, Black is the New Gay.

His star having fallen, Yiannopoulos wasn't the best example of somebody right-wing evangelicals would rally around the way they have steadfastly defended the Prince President of Lies, Donald Joffrey Trump. I'm fully convinced that not only would they stick by him if he shot somebody on Fifth Avenue, they'd stick by him even if that somebody were Franklin Graham.

While performing an abortion. On his daughter. Of his incestuous love child. And bragging about it every step of the way.

Those right-wing evangelicals have already sold their souls to him.

The rest is merely haggling over the price.

Stacking the Triskaidekaitis

I first drew about the appointment of Roger Severino to the civil rights office of Health and Human Services last March. Severino, previously a lobbyist for the right-wing Heritage Foundation, has been an agitator against marriage equality and the treating transgender persons with any humanity or respect.

“On the basis of religious teachings, moral reasoning, scientific evidence, and medical experience, many have strong grounds to hold that one’s sex is an immutable characteristic,” Severino and a co-author wrote in a Heritage Foundation report in January 2016. “Many involved in providing medical care and those enrolled in health insurance plans have serious objections to participating in or paying for sex-reassignment surgeries or gender transitions.”

Last week, Severino announced the creation of a "Conscience and Religious Freedom Division" within his office

to ensure that health care providers are allowing workers to opt out of procedures when they have religious or moral objections. The new division would be a third, co-equal branch with the office's existing two divisions that focus on federal civil rights laws and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Severino and his Conscience and Religious Freedom ("Condom" for short) Division will come to the defense of America's beleaguered and persecuted Christian minority, ensuring that Christian health care workers will no longer be forced to violate their fundamental religious beliefs. No more will Baptist podiatrists be transferred to the Abortion Unit. Catholic pharmacists will no longer have to fill morning-after pill prescriptions for divorcees. Pentecostal dishwashers in the hospital cafeteria need not live in fear of transgender visitors asking them for directions to the ladies' room — wait, you say that's not the problem?

But longtime HHS officials say that the existing civil rights office was more than capable of handling these issues and that creating an entire division to focus on religious liberty sends the wrong message.
"This is a classic solution in search of a problem," said one official who's handled civil rights issues at HHS. "And it’s a problem that doesn’t really exist, because hospitals tend to be really compliant on this kind of stuff."
During the Obama administration, evangelical groups had even hailed HHS for its efforts to enforce religious freedom, such as intervening in a lawsuit filed by an anti-abortion nurse against Mount Sinai Health System in New York.

But if you thought my examples were silly, go back and read that excerpt from Severino's Heritage Foundation report again.

"[T]hose enrolled in health insurance plans have serious objections to ... paying for sex-reassignment surgeries or gender transitions"?

If you think about what Severino is saying there, it's that anyone paying for health insurance ought to have the right to object to somebody else's health care.

Just because your faith leads you to abstain from pork doesn't mean you have a right to stop your health insurance company from covering someone else's hospital visit for trichinosis.

You may have a religious commitment to pacifism, but you don't get to sue to get your premiums back if your insurance company pays for a veteran's PTSD treatment.

And if your god tells you to be vigilant against transgender cooties but your insurance company pays for the estrogen treatments of someone on the other side of town, tough. It's none of your damned business.

Q Toon: Heaven and Michele

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q Syndicate👼Jan 11, 2018 EditorialCartoonists.com

Former Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann announced on the Christian Broadcasting Network that she might consider running for the Senate seat vacated by Democrat Al Franken, but she hadn't heard from God on the matter quite yet. Editorial cartoonists are now waiting with bated breath in hopes that God gives the go-ahead to the woman who believes that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation, that Iraq and Libya should have reimbursed the U.S. for overthrowing their leaders, that Barack Obama was allowing Islamic extremists to impose Sharia law in the U.S. by 2015, and that

"Because our K-12 public school system, of which ninety per cent of all youth are in the public school system, they will be required to learn that homosexuality is normal, equal and perhaps you should try it. And that will occur immediately, that all schools will begin teaching homosexuality."

But wait, there's more.

"What a bizarre time we’re in, Jan, when a judge will say to little children that you can’t say the pledge of allegiance, but you must learn that homosexuality is normal and you should try it.”

“You have a teacher talking about his gayness. [The elementary school student] goes home then and says 'Mom! What’s gayness? We had a teacher talking about this today.' The mother says 'Well, that’s when a man likes other men, and they don’t like girls.' The boy’s eight. He’s thinking, 'Hmm. I don’t like girls. I like boys. Maybe I’m gay.' And you think, 'Oh, that’s, that’s way out there. The kid isn’t gonna think that.' Are you kidding? That happens all the time. You don’t think that this is intentional, the message that’s being given to these kids? That’s child abuse.”

"I am not here bashing people who are homosexuals, who are lesbians, who are bisexual, who are transgender. We need to have profound compassion for people who are dealing with the very real issue of sexual dysfunction in their life and sexual identity disorders."

"So now we find out these people are making decisions based on our politics and beliefs, and they're going to be in charge of our health care. There's a huge national database that's being created right now. Your health care, my health care, all the Fox viewers' health care, their personal, intimate, most close to the vest secrets will be in that database, and the IRS is in charge of that database? So the IRS will have the ability potentially — will they? — to deny health care, to deny access, to delay health care? This is serious! Based upon our political beliefs? That's why we have to repeal Obamacare."

Of course, the last time political wags thought the very idea of a dimwitted, factually-challenged narcissist running for political office ought to be good for a laugh, we ended up with President Trump.

Conventional wisdom, which tends to emanate from NYC, DC and LA, not Lake Wobegon, is that Minnesota is a Blue State; but it's worth remembering that Al Franken was only elected Senator in 2008 by the slimmest of margins. Republicans can and do win statewide races there; Minnesota Democrats have won only five senatorial elections and two gubernatorial races over the last 20 years.

Both of Minnesota's Senate seats will be up for grabs this year. The last time that happened, in 1978, Republicans won both races.

If that should happen again, heaven help us.

Q Toon: Second Best Wishes

I have to confess that I'm conflicted about the Supreme Court's current case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. As a legally married gay man, I'm perturbed by the claim that I might be denied service by any given business establishment on the basis of the proprietor's religious-based prejudice against me.

On the other hand, as someone who draws freelance cartoons for publication, I think I ought to be able to refuse, were someone to offer to hire me to draw a cartoon I vehemently disagree with. I also play music for weddings and funerals, although I've never had the dilemma of being  presented with musical requests that I would have refused to play.

Still, refusing to stick two plastic grooms on the top of a wedding cake seems almost dickish to me. I've been around to see all manner of wedding cakes for different-sex couples, frosted to match the color of the bridesmaids' dresses or the groom's army camouflage, festooned with homages to Star Trek, country music or Harley Davidson.

Mr. Phillips may very well be the artiste that he portrays himself to be, but if he should win the right to discriminate against same-sex couples, how far does that right extend? The so-called religious right has been agitating for decades now for their right not to participate in society's progress; it is no stretch of the imagination to suppose that they would press further for the right of plumbers or auto mechanics or firefighters or emergency medical technicians or (now that corporations are people) insurance companies to refuse service to LGBTQ persons.

Given that the same religious right feels persecuted by commercial transactions during which the employees of the business sell them whatever goods and services they want, but wish them anything other than a Merry Christmas, it's hard to be completely sympathetic with their plight.

Q Toon: Moore-ality Play

Cartoonist and content provider Daryl Cagle coined the term "Yahtzee" for when two or more editorial cartoonists draw the same idea on the same topic. That's what happened with the cartoon I drew on Sunday night, because I've seen the same basic idea, more or less, in the meantime drawn by Steve Sack and Phil Hinds. (Sack, as ever, did the concept up best, if I do say so myself, since he's not the sort to say it himself.)

Anyway, it's too late to change my cartoon now, and besides, all the other great ideas about Alabama's Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate have already been taken.

When I was at the drawing board, my chief worry was that Judge Moore would drop out or be forced out of the race between then and now.

I needn't have worried. A poll found that 37% of Alabama Evangelicals, and 29% of the electorate in general, claimed they were "more likely" to vote for Moore after the allegations against him were made public. Dinesh D'Souza, or whomever he was plagiarizing, tweeted that he used to be lukewarm about Moore, but now "we must elect him." An Alabama politician compared Moore to St. Joseph, Step-Father of Our Lord, and an Alabama pastor slammed Washington Republicans as "sissies" for withdrawing their support of Moore.

On the other hand, current polls show that Moore's Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, has come from behind and may have as much as a 12-point lead. Jones, a former U.S. Attorney during the Clinton administration who prosecuted Klan members who bombed a black church in 1963, has been careful to distance himself from national Democrats. Republicans are desperately considering delaying next month's special election, or pushing a write-in campaign for incumbent Luther Strange, whom Moore beat in the September primary.

I don't know whether Alabama is one of those states that requires a run-off election if nobody gets over 50% of the vote, but it seems likely (that being one of the tactics southern states used to safeguard against Black candidates coming out ahead if the White vote were split); that would be a possibility if Republicans split between Moore and Strange. National Republicans would prefer a Strange-Jones runoff or maybe a Strange-Moore runoff, but could be stuck with a Moore-Jones runoff prolonging their present agony.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, an evil wizard at the byzantine rules of politics, has even floated the idea of having Strange resign from the Senate before the December election, in order to force a new election. If Moore should win next month's election outright, the Senate could vote to expel him, allowing Alabama's Republican Governor to appoint a replacement. That seems a long shot with little precedent, but so did refusing to consider President Obama's appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

These are interesting times. Strange days, indeed.

Q Toon: WeatherProphecy with Lauryl Sulfate

Rain falls on the just and the unjust, as the Good Book says; but there's always some holy roller assuring us that the rain was intended for the unjust all along. It's just that God has crappy aim.

The crack about Hurricane Harvey pummeling Houston because of its lesbian mayor (who left office last year) came from Ghostface look-alike Ann Coulter, who was, no doubt, merely making a desperate effort to tweet something —anything— more outrageous than Donald Trump does.

But her tweet that former Mayor Annise Parker was a more credible explanation for Hurricane Harvey than climate change provides the launching pad for this week's cartoon.

I woke up the morning after drawing this cartoon to find that nearly every other editorial cartoonist on the AAEC site had drawn cartoons about hurricanes and climate change, but it's important to note that the destruction we've witnessed from Harvey and Irma cannot be blamed on one factor alone.  Nick Anderson penned an excellent long-form cartoon for the Texas Tribune on unfettered development contributing to flooding in and around Houston, and while 600 trillion gallons of water is going to wreak havoc on the best of ecosystems, I highly recommend Anderson's well-researched opus.

Houston isn't the only place where developers regard the wetlands in particular and the environment generally as a nuisance getting in the way of their profits. Here in Wisconsin, the Republican governor and his Republican-run legislature are greasing the skids for the building of a huge Foxxcon plant, legislating that any legal challenges from environmentalists must go straight to the Republican-run State Supreme Court for judgment. Since Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce has successfully packed that court with their paid stooges, the outcome of any environmental lawsuit is a foregone conclusion in favor of whatever degradation Foxxcon might have wrought.

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Incidentally, I have no idea where Hurricane Jose plans to go. I had been checking storm predictions on windy.com daily as Florida braced for Irma's assault, and the precise tracks predicted for the two hurricanes changed from day to day. The site originally had Irma blustering up Florida's east coast and crashing into the U.S. again where Georgia meets South Carolina, but it moved her path westward a little bit each day. As of this morning, windy.com has Jose brushing against North Carolina's outer banks, Cape Cod, and Nova Scotia, but mostly staying out to sea.

I think the good citizens of the landlocked state of Vermont may rest easy. Until the snows fall, anyway.

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Tune in again tomorrow for a bonus cartoon on another topic about which all the other members of the AAEC site have already picked the bones clean.

Q Toon: The Gnashville Sound

With most Americans' attention fixed on the devastation of Hurricane Harvey down in the Houston area, a meeting of conservative evangelicals (including many members of Donald Trump's Evangelical Advisory Board) met in Nashville, Tennessee and published a statement condemning LGBTQs.

Article 10 of the "Nashville Statement" tells LGBTQ persons that they are not Christian, and neither is anyone who supports them:

WE AFFIRM that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.
WE DENY that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.

The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), which produced the statement, was founded in 1987 to protect the "It's A Man's World, And By That We Mean A Straight Man" view of conservative Christianity. For them, a woman's place is in the home, standing by her man, because Father Knows Best. It's a doctrine called "complementarianism," as opposed to egalitarianism, in which men and women are viewed as equals.

Complementarians are Biblical literalists, and according to their interpretation of the Scriptures, women and men are to have distinct roles at home and in church. In essence and in practice, women are to submit to men, who are to be spiritual leaders.
Women cannot preach or hold any kind of spiritual authority over men. Men exercise “headship” over their wives, establishing a hierarchy whose basic mechanics differ from denomination to denomination.

As far as these people are concerned, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and especially transgender people present a direct threat to their patriarchal worldview. One cannot reconcile complementarianism with any relationship that does not involve someone with a vagina submitting herself to someone with a penis; and the doctrine certainly cannot account for the possibility of someone born with one but feeling compelled to live as someone born with the other.

If this were strictly a matter of who is welcome in a CBMW church on Sunday morning and who isn't, this would be a tempest in an easily avoided teapot. But because these people have worked long and hard to establish a right-wing Christian Theocracy in this country, even to the point of banding together to give slavish support to a materialistic, hedonistic, unrepentant, biblical illiterate as President of the United States (but hey, at least he's got the male dominance thing down pat), their anti-LGBTQ dogma has consequences far outside their church doors.

[T]he type of theology underlying the Nashville Statement is used to defend the denial of goods and services to same-sex couples. The political power evangelicals hold in the United States allows them to codify their beliefs in law. Dozens of “religious freedom restoration acts,” primarily in the form of so-called bathroom bills, have focused on policing the lives of L.G.B.T. people. Since the 2014 decision by the Department of Education to include gender identity under Title IX protections, more than 60 Christian colleges have requested — and many have received — waivers to discriminate against L.G.B.T. students.

Even worse is their promotion of quack "reparative therapy" in which psychological torture is used to "cure" same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria. So too their active promotion of a culture in which LGBTQ lives are devalued to the point where some people still believe they have moral justification to murder us on sight.

So enjoy this week's cartoon. It's more light-hearted than I truly feel about this topic, but in parody, you have to go where the song takes you.

And in case there's some reader out there who has never been exposed to country 'n' western music, the song is "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys" by Ed and Patsy Bruce (although if it's giving you an earworm for the rest of the day, you're probably hearing Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson's cover of the tune).

Q Toon: Great Is Thy Cravenness

Led by Merck's Kenneth Frazier, eight business and labor leaders resigned from Donald Trump's Manuafacturers' Jobs Initiative Council over Donald Trump's tardy, begrudging, and muddled condemnation of Nazis, Klansmen and unspecified radicals "on both sides, on both sides." Leaders of another council, the Strategic and Policy Forum, announced it was disbanding because Charlottesville had become "a distraction" to their purpose.

"As our members have expressed individually over the past several days, intolerance, racism and violence have absolutely no place in this country and are an affront to core American values. We believe the debate over Forum participation has become a distraction from our well-intentioned and sincere desire to aid vital policy discussions on how to improve the lives of everyday Americans."

A pouting Trump seized his ball and flounced home. (Or, rather, to a campaign rally in Arizona.)

Before he could disband them himself, the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities  resigned en masse in a letter crafted so that the first letter of each paragraph spelled out the word "resist."

State Department Science Envoy Daniel M. Kammen followed suit with his own acrostic letter of resignation. At this point, the only reason the rest of the career bureaucrats and Obama holdovers are still in Washington is that they're still working on how to hide clever messages in their resignation letters.

The only resulting resignation from Trump's Evangelical Advisory Board, on the other hand, was New York City pastor Rev. A.R. Barnard. If his resignation letter contained any secret message, it has not yet been found. (A Chicago area pastor had resigned from the board last year over the Billy Bush interview tape.)

Prior to Rev. Barnard leaving the 24-member board, Matthew Dowd, a strategist on George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, tweeted "Not a single member of Trump's Evangelical Council has resigned. We have learned corporate America has a greater moral compass.  So so sad."

The remaining members of the commission, the most prominent of whom had had no hesitation to criticize Democratic presidents, crept to the defense of Mr. Trump.

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, praised the president for his "bold truthful statement" about Charlottesville. Mark Burns, pastor of Harvest Praise and Worship Center in South Carolina, retweeted a link to a television interview in which he declared his support for Trump and criticized the counterprotesters. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, blamed the news media for misrepresenting Trump's comments.

The Evangelical Board hold-outs have defended standing by their man by claiming that it's their Christian duty to give Trump their aid and counsel. By contrast, that Chicago pastor who quit the board last year, Rev. James MacDonald, posted this Facebook message to his congregation:

"The greater your influence the greater your complicity if you don't call the Charlottesville rally and attack what it really is: a heinous act of domestic terrorism entirely rooted in racial hatred.
"It is the height of hypocrisy to demand that people use the proper term 'Islamic terrorism' ... then turn around and refuse to use similarly candid terms when referring to racial hate crimes."

Backward Christian Soldiers

Donald Joffrey Trump's nominee for Secretary of the Army is a Tennessee state legislator named Mark Green (R-Clarksville). Where Barack Obama opened the U.S. military to LGBTQ service members and appointed Eric Fanning to be the first openly gay head of any branch of the U.S. military, it is clear that Trump is issuing the military an about-face.

Green is a lead sponsor of a bill guaranteeing educators a right to discriminate against LGBTQ persons, and backs another bill allowing mental health practitioners to refuse to treat LGBTQ patients. The West Point graduate sponsored a Tennessee "bathroom bill," and another bill prohibiting local governments from enforcing antidiscrimination policies protecting LGBTQ citizens.

Green's bigotry comes cloaked in religiosity. He told a radio interviewer that because of St. Paul's letter to the Romans:

"...as a state senator, my responsibility very clearly in Romans 13 is to create an environment where people who do right are rewarded, and people who do wrong are crushed. Evil is crushed. And so I'm going to protect women in their bathrooms, and I'm going to protect our state against potential infiltration by Syrian ISIS people through a  refugee program." 

Speaking to a Tea Party Koffee Klatch in Chattanooga, Green said transgender persons are mentally diseased, deriding them as "guys and gals with question marks." He also told the group that legalized same-sex marriage might lead to using taxpayer dollars for infanticide.

His animus is by no means limited to gays, lesbian, and transgender persons. At that same Koffee Klatch, he enthusiastically supported a variety of other tenets of Tea Partisan faith:

To a questioner who worried about armed insurrection by people who “don’t belong here, like Muslims in the United States,” Green said it was a “great question.” Referring to the “Muslim horde” that sacked Constantinople five centuries ago, Green agreed that we must “take a stand on the indoctrination of Islam in our public schools”—even as he vowed to spread the Christian light into the military and the culture as he had as a young missionary in a Muslim section of Toronto.
Green agreed with a questioner that President Obama is not a citizen and he refused to answer whether the former president is really a Muslim. Asked what could account for a mysterious rise in Latinos registering to vote in Tennessee, Green theorized they were “being bused here probably.”

Green's confirmation is not a sure thing, given skepticism expressed by Senate Armed Services Chair John McCain and others.

“The statements he has made on a number of fronts — in particular to the LGBT community, to different minority groups, different religious groups — are a great, great concern toward military readiness,” said [Iraq War verteran Daniel] Feehan, who served as principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for readiness from 2015 until earlier this year.
It’s already hard enough to recruit a talented, diverse military to accomplish critical missions, Feehan said. Green’s record and public statements will make that job even more difficult by creating an environment in which potential recruits might feel unwelcome, Feehan said.

On the list of organizations opposed to Green's nomination are GLAAD, Outserve-SLDN, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Human Rights Campaign, the American Military Partner Association, and the Truman National Security Project, the last of which wrote:

"As every military leader knows, unit readiness at every level is built on mutual trust, often referred to as unit cohesion. When leaders denigrate service members on the basis of their personal characteristics, it undermines that essential trust. As several of you know firsthand, that can be the difference success and failure on the battlefield."

Reports earlier this week that Green might withdraw his nomination are so far being denied. If those reports prove correct, Green would be Trump's second Army Secretary nominee to pull out; billionaire Vincent Viola withdrew his nomination on the grounds that he couldn't extricate himself from several conflicts of interest with his family businesses. (Trump’s pick for Navy Secretary, financier Philip Bilden, also dropped out of consideration, citing similar business conflicts. President Trump Inc. could learn a thing or two from Viola and Bilden.)

Yet Republicans have been more than happy to stock all branches of government with reactionary right-wing apparatchiks, and party leadership is likely to pressure its wavering members to fall in line and approve whomever Trump wants. There is nothing the GOP values more highly than partisan unity.

Reversing any and all progress made by the Obama administration, however, ranks a very close second.

Q Toon: HAL No

16 years after the disaster that took the crew of Discovery One, and the dishonest media still refuse to cover the story. Sad! Stop all obelisks from entering U.S. until we find out what's going on!