Q Toon: Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back in the Lair

He's back! And just in time for Hallowe'en.

The Supreme Court heard opening arguments in Chiles v. Salazar last week.

Kaley Chiles, who bills herself as a Christian therapist, has sued the state of Colorado over its Minor Conversion Therapy Law (MCTL), which bars mental health professionals from offering "conversion therapy," the widely discredited practice of pressuring a patient who identifies as LGBTQ+ to change their sexual orientation.

Chiles, who is a practicing Christian, contends that although she does not try to “convert” her clients, she does try to help them with objectives that may include “seeking to reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions” or becoming more comfortable with their bodies. Chiles filed a lawsuit in Colorado, asking a federal court to block the state from enforcing the conversion therapy ban against her.

Colorado has not taken any action to enforce its ban against Chiles, or, for that matter, anyone else during the six years that the MCTL has been on its books, which brings into question what standing she has to bring a case to the nation's highest court. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out, "we [even] have the entity charged with administering the law saying 'We’re not going to apply it to your kind of … therapy.'" 

That didn't stop the right-wing "Alliance Defending Freedom" from bringing the case before a Court majority eager to overrule Colorado's legislature, or the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime™ from filing an amicus curiae brief in support. Calling Colorado's law "blatant viewpoint discrimination," Justice Samuel Alito, for one, agrees with the plaintiff's argument that while the law does allow exceptions for religious practice, it violates her freedom of speech.

Twenty other states have laws similar to Colorado's MCTL, which could very well be rendered moot by Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Comey Barrett, and Roberts, in spite of bipartisan, professional and religious condemnation of conversion practices. Even some former "ex-gay" advocates have weighed in against conversion therapy:

"We once believed that there was something morally wrong and psychologically 'broken' about being LGBTQ. We know better now. We once believed that sexual orientation or gender identity were somehow chosen or could be changed. We know better now. We once thought it was impossible to embrace our sexual orientation or gender identity as an intrinsic, healthy part of who we are and who we were created to be. We know better now...

"In light of this, we now stand united in our conviction that conversion therapy is not 'therapy,' but is instead both ineffective and harmful. We align ourselves with every major mainstream professional medical and mental health organization in denouncing attempts to change sexual orientation or gender identity."

But we now live in a country where the conspiracy fabulists in charge of the nation's health care system have not merely freedom of speech but governmental imprimatur to say Tylenol causes autism, salmonella is good for you, and gender identity is a figment of your imagination. And any medical professional who disagrees is free to find other employment whether they want to or not.

And where a majority on the Supreme Court are free to prescribe the U.S. Constitution some conversion therapy into Project 2025.

Toon: Portrait of the Dorian Trump

In 2019, The Colorado Republican Party commissioned a portrait of Donald Trump to hang in the state capitol along with those of previous presidents of the United States. Sometime this week, while the rest of his maladministration was scrambling to explain why top-level officials had invited the editor of The Atlantic to join their conversation on an unsecure web app about bombing Yemen, Trump became aware of the $10,000 painting.

And he didn't like it.

So he took to Trump Social to complain.

As my colleague J.P. Trostle observed, the portrait does make Trump look like one of those official portraits of Soviet apparatchiks in the mid-20th Century. And appropriately so.

Anyway, Colorado Republicans know better than to incur the wrath of Mercurial Authoritarian Donald Joffrey Trump, so they are taking the portrait down to see if someone can produce a more accurate one.

How about Jane Rosenberg?

Q Toon: Merry Christmassacre

 

Saturday night, a young man armed with two long rifles of the AR-15 variety burst into Club Q, a popular LGBTQ+ bar in Colorado Springs, and opened fire. Two of the bar patrons heroically disarmed and subdued him, but not before five people were killed and at least 17 more injured by gunfire or in the ensuing panic.

It was an exceptionally violent week across the U.S. Prior to the Club Q shooting, a former member of the University of Virginia football team shot and killed three current Cavaliers and wounded two others on a bus returning to campus from a class field trip; someone still at large stabbed four University of Idaho students to death at their off-campus apartment.

Politicians and religious leaders from across the political spectrum expressed their varying degrees of outrage and sympathy after each of these tragedies, the Club Q attack no less than the others.

That includes Colorado Congressman Lauren Boebert — or someone on her staff, or whoever paid Elon Musk eight bucks to impersonate her — who sent out a sympathetic tweet the morning after the Club Q shooting:

Up to now, Boebert's reputation has been as an ammosexual activist (today's cartoon is based on her actual 2021 family Christmas card), a hard-core defender of all things Trump, and a spreader of Trans Derangement Syndrome. On the floor of the House, on the campaign trail, on right-wing media, and prolifically on Twitter, she has mocked others' pronoun preferences, blamed trans men for shortages of baby formula and tampons earlier this year, and accused the Biden “regime” of paying for the “mutilation of children who are gender confused.”

In August, Human Rights Campaign rated her as the #3 on their list of "the top ten people responsible for driving the 'grooming' narrative on Twitter."

Back when Twitter had rules about hateful conduct.

But if she finally wants the public to know she's now against slaughtering LGBTQ+ citizens, perhaps at least we're seeing some progress. Why, even Franklin Graham has come out against spraying weapons fire into gay bars.

Consider that only six years ago, the morning after the terrorist attack on Pulse nightclub in Orlando that killed 49 LGBTQ+ patrons, the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, thought it would be a good time to tweet out Galatians 6:7: "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

Faced with uproar from the LGBTQ+ community and our allies and friends, Patrick quickly took his tweet down, and his staff issued a mealy-mouthed apology that it had nothing to do with the massacre. It was just supposed to be an inspirational message from a random book off his nightstand.

Twenty or thirty years ago back before Twitter, politicians like Patrick would have responded to loss of LGBTQ+ life by proudly issuing that biblical passage as a press release. That generation of conservatives unapologetically exulted that HIV/AIDS was God's punishment of gay men for being gay, and made jokes about Jeffrey Dahmer.

So, goody for Lauren Boebert for showing some vestige of humanity this time. Those morning prayers were the least she could do, and I guess they're better than nothing at all.

But they don't get her off the hook for contributing to a culture that egged on — and armed — some murderous psychopathic loser.

Lambada Rising

Congresscretin Lauren Boebert (R-CO) was on Fox's Sunday Talking Points program this week. She was in high dudgeon, as all her fellow Requblicans are, that President Joe Biden had the temerity at a Democratic Party fundraiser to criticize the "semi-fascists" who have dominated the Requblican Party under Donald Trump, plotted to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, and attacked the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the government and hang the Vice President. An ideology that idolizes Hungary's dictator Viktor Orban. And as Requblican legislatures ban ideas they don't like and, by the way, have decided that if they don't like the election outcome of the people's votes, the Requblican legislatures can just declare Requblican candidates the winners no matter what.

Somehow, Boebert's word salad diatribe about Biden's remark included lambasting his student loan forgiveness program on the grounds that it will facilitate collegiate scholars majoring in "Lesbian Dance Theory."

It's a non sequitur, of course. But it's not as if Boebert can afford to disavow semi-fascism and offend her semi-fascist base.

To the best of my knowledge, no college, not even Barnard or Berkeley, offers a degree in Lesbian Dance Theory. I must note, however, that while I was an undergrad, my alma mater offered a "paracollege" program which allowed its students to fashion their own majors; so I suppose it's within the realm of possibility that someone between 1969 and 2000 developed a Lesbian Dance Theory major.

Although that really sounds more like a Ph.D. thesis to me, and St. Olaf offers only Bachelors degrees.

Now, originally, Boebert (who did in fact get her G.E.D. the same year she won election to Congress) said that hard-working Americans were being robbed so that "Karen's daughter" could get a B.A. in L.D.T. I'm not sure why Boebert chose to drag "Karens" into this.

"911? Some Black people are studying Lesbian Dance Theory in the park!"

I'm pretty sure that their demographic is solidly Requblican.

Q Toon: Devil's Food in the Details

Sorry I'm late...

We're assured that the Supreme Court's 7-2 ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado does not give carte blanche to bakers, photographers, florists and lunch counters to claim a religious right to discriminate against customers.

No, the justices tell us that this case was all about how the Colorado Civil Rights Commission mistreated the baker after he refused to bake a wedding cake for a couple getting married. One of the commissioners charged that religious justification of discrimination has been historically "despicable." Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote,

"The commissioner even went so far as to compare Phillips’ invocation of his sincerely held religious beliefs to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust. This sentiment is inappropriate for a Commission charged with the solemn responsibility of fair and neutral enforcement of Colorado’s antidiscrimination law—a law that protects discrimination on the basis of religion as well as sexual orientation.
"The record shows no objection to these comments from other commissioners. And the later state-court ruling reviewing the Commission’s decision did not mention those comments, much less express concern with their content. Nor were the comments by the commissioners disavowed in the briefs filed in this Court. For these reasons, the Court cannot avoid the conclusion that these statements cast doubt on the fairness and impartiality of the Commission’s adjudication of Phillips’ case." 

In their dissent, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonya Sotomayor noted that the couple had not asked Masterpiece Cakeshop to include any pro-marriage equality text on their cake, and were turned away because of their identity as a same-sex couple. Justices  Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer noted as much in their concurrence with the court's conservative majority, but were swayed by that commissioner's going all Christopher Hitchens about the case.

So let this be a lesson to all friends of the LGBTQ community, as well as all liberal-minded people in general. I appreciate that it's frustrating to live under the Corrupt Trump-McConnell-Ryan, Republican-gerrymandered-statehouses regime, but we all bear the burden of watching our tongues.

Go overboard criticizing a homophobic baker's religion, and it becomes all about you.

Hurl a sexist slur at Ivanka Trump after Roseanne Barr loses her TV show, and that becomes all about you.

Start your introduction of Bruce Springsteen at the Tony Awards with a four-letter verb plus "Trump," and even his locking immigrant children in cages, insulting our closest allies, and giving the Korean peninsula away to Kim Jong Un become all about you.

Gosh, I hope I haven't offended any right-wing snowflakes just now.

Q Toon: For the Record

When I'm up late on Sunday night cussing at a blank sheet of bristol board that stubbornly resists becoming the editorial cartoon that I have to send to my editor by Monday morning, it would be really, really nice if I had some inside source on the Supreme Court who would leak to me that the justices were going to issue a ruling of particular interest to the LGBTQ community the next day.

Which is to say that this week's syndicated cartoon is not about the First Fondantmentalist Church of the Sacred Wedding Cake.

So instead, Buzz and Killer have noticed something remarkable about 2018 off-year elections. According to the LGBTQ Victory Fund, there are nearly 400 openly gay, lesbian, bi, transgender and queer candidates for local, state and national office — over 50 in Texas alone.

Former Dallas sheriff Lupe Valdez, another Texas-based candidate, already shattered a ceiling last month when she became the first Latina and openly gay nominee for governor in the state. ...
Valdez, 70, is no stranger to breaking barriers. Despite her family’s fear that her running for public office would ignite a homophobic backlash in Texas — where it is still legal to discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity — Valdez was not deterred. In 2005, she became the only Latina sheriff in the U.S. and one of the country’s few out LGBTQ public officials.

Elsewhere, Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin has been targeted by right-wing PACs for defeat as she runs for a third term this year. Her TV ads focus on keeping American manufacturing plants open, but she has also opened up about her childhood with a mother who struggled with drug addiction. Colorado Congressman Jared Polis is giving up his seat to run for Governor, taking the risk of appearing in his TV ads with his husband and son by his side — standard practice for heterosexual candidates, but something most LGBTQ candidates have been counseled to avoid.

Consider the example of Gina Ortiz Jones, the Democratic nominee for Texas's 23rd Congressional District. The former Air Force intelligence officer is an out lesbian, but only to a degree.

“My girlfriend teases me sometimes for not sharing enough about myself on social media, particularly as I endeavor into an arena where people need to know the person before they want to hear the policies,” Jones wrote in October, referring to a partner she did not name. “I can’t help but think that some of that is still related to the precautionary steps I took as a cadet and officer. All this to say, there are effects to not coming out, or feeling as though you’re not able to come out.”

But if some candidates now feel confident running as openly LGBTorQ, other candidates have decided that it's safe to run as an open Nazi.

In Illinois’ 17th Congressional District, in the state’s northwestern corner, Democratic incumbent Cheri Bustos will face a GOP nominee named Bill Fawell, who believes, according to CNN research posted Friday, that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job, and that Beyonce and Taylor Swift are stumping for the Illuminati, a worldwide domination sect that some conspiracists insist exists.
In the same state’s 3rd district, comprising southwest Chicago and its suburbs, Arthur Jones, a Nazi — not a sobriquet, his preferred affiliation — became the GOP candidate despite being rejected by national Republicans and the state party for denying the Holocaust.
Party leaders have also gone out of their way to denounce Paul Nehlen, who is seeking the soon-to-be-vacated seat of House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin’s 1st, and Patrick Little, who is running for the U.S. Senate in California. Nehlen proudly attacks his enemies as Jews and Little is a white supremacist.

Mr. Little finished twelfth in Tuesday's "jungle primary," and Nehlen is unlikely to win in my home district (he's got carpetbagging Green Beret Nick Polce to split the pro-fascist vote with him).

Happily, there are hundreds of LGBTQ candidates and only eight seven Nazis running for office this year. If it's unlikely that any card-carrying Nazis will be sworn into office next year, however, there are plenty of Republicans running just to the right of Mussolini who will be. They may not call themselves Nazis — they may not see themselves as Nazis — but the Nazis recognize their fellow travelers.

As Patrick Little told MSNBC before the California primary, Donald Trump "dog whistled about globalists,” even if he "didn't understand he was talking about Jews until after the election.”

Radical right-wing candidates have had the wind at their back in 2010, 2014, and 2016. For all the talk of a "blue wave" this year, Trump has the bully pulpit (and his Twitter account) and a devoted following that believes any bullstool he, Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, or their Facebook friends from Smolensk tell them.

Besides, I seem to recall all the experts predicting a Hillary Clinton landslide not very long ago.

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.

Another Day in America

This week's Stepback Saturday is sparked by yet another episode of America's Well-Regulated Militia run amok.

I could start this review of my old cartoons of previous gun murders anywhere, but I'm going to start with this one from March, 1996.

The National Rifle Association and its stooges in all levels of government often respond to any call for gun control with the tiresome and disingenuous trope that if we'd only just enforce the gun control laws that we already have, yadda, yadda, yadda. What action they have taken, however, is to repeal as many of those already existing laws as they can, and to defund enforcement of the laws that remain.

In April, 1999, two well-regulated militia high school students tucked an arsenal of semi-automatic weapons under their trench coats and put Columbine High School on the map.

Mass shootings at the workplace were already old hat by this time. If a sentence includes the word "disgruntled," you can be sure that it also includes a body count.

Numbers of casualties alone should not be the only thing that shocks us. This cartoon from March, 2000 was occasioned by the shooting of a very young girl by a very young boy. I forget whether the lad knew he had a real, loaded gun or not. If this had been the only time such a tragedy had ever happened, I'm sure that you and I would both remember the details.

When I first decided upon the theme of this blog entry, I thought I might only have a few cartoons to choose from, since most of the cartoons I've drawn in the current millennium have been for the Milwaukee Business Journal and the gay press, and gun violence isn't a prominent issue for either of them. Since the Beej no longer wanted my cartoons by the time a neo-Nazi shot up the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek in 2012, I drew no cartoons on gun violence for them; but it turns out that I've drawn too many cartoons for Q Syndicate about gun fatalities to include all of them today.

The inspiration behind this cartoon was a widely published photo of a middle school student who was shot at his school; in the photo, he had a caterpillar in his hand.  If a fellow student had not decided that bringing a gun to school and shooting a classmate in the back of the head was the most appropriate response to unwanted advances, Lawrence King would be 22 now.

My intention was not to include the names of the gunmen in these incidents, but I can't avoid it in the case of a drifter who claimed that a lifetime of teasing over his last name was the reason that he sought out a crowded Roanoke, Virginia gay bar and started shooting.

I bring up this particular case in part because of the coincidence that a shooting 15 years later in Roanoke, on live television, seems to have inspired the Umpqua Community College shooter to aspire to the same sort of lasting infamy. Yet, unless you have some close connection to the Roanoke gay community, I'll bet you had totally forgotten all about Mr. Gay.

There was no LGBT connection to the mass shooting at the Aurora, Colorado movie theatre...

...at least not for most of us. But some people are determined that guns have nothing to do with gun violence, and will blame anything, anything, ANYTHING else.

And the beat goes on.

Q Toon: Sermon at the Counter II

In spite of feeling that I put out the definitive cartoon on the topic just over a month ago, I've drawn about local county and municipal clerks who still defiantly refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, the Supreme Court of the United States notwithstanding.

Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis is putting up a legal fight claiming that other people's right to a marriage license is a violation of her First Amendment religious liberty rights to refuse to do her job. On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge David Bunning stayed his earlier ruling that had required Davis to set her religious views aside and stop discriminating against same-sex couples.

Kentucky is not alone in facing unresolved issues related to marriage equality since Obergefell v. Hodges. Lawsuits have now been filed in Colorado, Florida, Mississippi and South Carolina claiming that public officials' religious beliefs supersede their responsibilities to their constituents.

Now, in case there are any sticklers out there who question the religious sincerity of the unnamed clerk in this week's cartoon, please note that in every panel of the cartoon, her head is covered by a dialogue balloon.

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: To Have and to Hold...

I realize that promising to "obey" is out of fashion; most couples replace "obey" with "cherish" these days. But I wanted Hector and Kevin to use the most traditional version of the marriage vows just to point out what isn't there.

This week's cartoon addresses the allegation that the reason marriage is for different-sex couples only is because they can have children and same-sex couples can't.

Aaron Lindstrom, defending Michigan's opposite-sex supremacy laws: “The state has an interest in marriage because marriage is linked to children,” and to how they’re cared for and whether they’re raised by both a mother and a father.

Judge Paul Kelly's dissent in the Colorado case: "It is biologically undeniable that opposite-gender marriage has a procreative potential that same-gender marriage lacks. [Furthermore,] the state could rationally and sincerely believe that children are best raised by two parents of opposite gender."

Virginia's Catholic Bishops response to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court decision: "Indeed, by its very nature this institution is ordered toward the regeneration and survival of the human race. For that reason Virginia's constitution rightly recognizes the unique contributions marriage -- the union of one man and one woman -- makes to children and to the common good."

Ignored by Lindstrom, Kelly and the bishops are not only the fact that marriage has long been open to couples who are infertile, aged, or having no intention to procreate; but also the fact that same-sex couples can also be parents. Some come to their partners with children due to previous relationships, and there is indeed nothing about same-sex orientation that ipso facto negates the parenting drive.

Besides, it's too late now for traditionalists to go back and change the marriage vows to read: "...to have and to hold babies."

I'd Only Need to Update the Headlines

Some cartoons, sadly, never get old.

I drew this particular one 13 years ago this month.