Dip In Road

Trump errand boy Devin Nunes (R-CA, and a co-sponsor of the 2017 "Discouraging Frivolous Lawsuits Act") has decided to sue Twitter over some users making fun at his expense.

What horrible things did these accounts say about Nunes to warrant the judiciary’s intervention? The account named “Devin Nunes’ Mom” receives the most attention in the complaint. Its owner frequently posted caustic remarks about him and his actions toward the Russia investigation. One tweet said that Nunes was unfit to run the House Intelligence Committee, while another joked that he was “voted ‘Most Likely to Commit Treason’ in high school.” Some tweets are indistinguishable from legitimate political criticism. Others are more puerile, implying that Nunes wanted to commit sexual acts with Trump and other top Republicans.

Twitter had already suspended the "Devin Nunes' Mom" account — for impersonating a real person, not for materially damaging Mr. Nunes. How the congresscritter intends to prove real damage is hard to fathom. He's a public figure, which makes him fair game by any interpretation of the concept of free speech, and he volunteered for the damn job.

Mr. Nunes might want to read up on Hustler Magazine Inc. v. Falwell someday. In the meantime, he's pretty much inviting the rest of us to pile on.

Fake News, 1918 Edition

Seditionback Saturday hearkens once again to the thrilling days of yestercentury, where we find the First Amendment under fire... from the press.

"A Convenient Perch" by Ted Brown in Chicago Daily News, ca. May, 1918

Now that The Masses had been shut down, there were few publications willing to tolerate any dissent about United States participation in Europe's Great War. German peace overtures had to be dismissed out of hand lest one's patriotism be called into question. And hanging onto one's cultural heritage had become suspect; who knew whether the fellows babbling in some foreign tongue might be plotting to blow up the town armory? (Or forcing Aaron  Schlossberg to pay for their welfare 100 years later?)

"Have You a Little Gas Mask" by Cy Hungerford in Pittsburgh Sun, c. May, 1918

This next cartoon of a row of Deutsche Zeitung readers was drawn to illustrate a column by Frederick Boyd Stevenson for the Brooklyn Eagle headlined "Who Has Kept Kaiserism in German Newspapers?: ...

"Is This Somewhere in Germany or Somewhere in America?" by Beaumont Fairbank in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 5, 1918 

"... How the American Defense Society Took Up the Task of Getting the Patriotic Proprietors of Newsstands to Ban All Newspapers and Periodicals Printed in the German Language and How the Spirit of America Is Doing the Rest — Twelve German Language Newspapers In This Country Quit Publications in Two Weeks and More Are Ready to Follow."

(I've omitted half of the subhead, but you get the idea.)

"Torpedoed" by Sidney Greene in New York Evening Telegram, May 27, 1918

Stevenson's column started out praising German-Americans who served the Union in the Civil War, but then launched into a paragraph of leading questions suspicious of the German-language press in America. "Do you or anyone else know how many of these German-language newspapers printed in this country denounced the crime of Germany? Do any of you know how many of these German-language newspapers defended the sinking of the Lusitania?" And so on.

Well, of course you didn't, if you didn't read German. And, in true Fox News style, Stevenson never quite got around to telling you, either.

"Breath of the Hun" by W.A. Rogers in New York World, ca. May, 1918

Stevenson continued:

"Today many [German-Americans] are still reading in German, talking in German, thinking in German. Many of them have made themselves obnoxious to Americans in their public organizations and their private clubs.
"And who is responsible for this un-Americanism?
"The German-language press of America."

Stevenson praised the efforts of the American Defense Society and other citizens "chafing under sight of German-language newspapers waving before them like the flag of Germany" to push for official censorship of German-language newspapers as well as to pressure newspaper vendors not to sell them and publishing companies not to print them.

"The Kaiser's Shadow" by Harry Tuthill in St. Louis Star, May or June, 1918

The ADS, Stevenson reported, had backed an amendment to the 1917 Espionage Act by Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) stating, "The use of the mails should not be permitted to any newspaper, magazine, periodical, circulars or pamphlets which are printed in whole or in part in the German language." While that amendment had failed to be included in the final bill, the the ADS had claimed victory in getting local officials to ban German-language newspapers in several cities in New Jersey and Long Island.

The twelve German-language papers cited in the column's subhead included "the formerly very influential" Texas Deutsche Zeitung of Houston, and the 77-year-old Deutsche Korrespondent of Baltimore. The Socialist New Yorker Volkszeitung also planned to suspend publication and repurpose itself as an English-only newspaper.

Downtown, the New York Evening Telegram, which regularly printed full pages in Italian for its espatriati readership, repeatedly ran the following box editorial demanding that German newspapers be shut down:

Box editorial appearing in New York Evening Telegram, May, 1918

But there was more to worry about than those sneaky Deutschsprechenders.

"Know Them?" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 13, 1918

In Congress, there remained criticism of the Wilson administration, alleging that the U.S. was still unprepared for the war, and that Secretary of War Newton Baker was not up to the task. It hadn't helped that Baker's first statement to reporters upon his appointment in 1916 was "I am an innocent. I do not know anything about this job."

"Synchronizer" by Jay "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, ca. May 7, 1918

There was plenty of ammunition for critics of American readiness. The Aircraft Board was forced to admit that plans for an air fleet were still being designed and re-designed on the drawing board — it was, after all, a fledgling industry.

"End of the First Chapter" by Milton Halladay in Providence Journal, ca. May, 1918

In more established industries, the American outlook was more positive.

"Catching Up" by Archibald Chapin in St. Louis Republic, ca. May, 1918

On the other side of the trenches, German cartoonists worked to reassure their readers that worrisome talk of America's entry into the war with all its fresh materiel wasn't really so serious a threat to the Vaterland.

"Mister Barnums Hilfe" by E. Schilling in Simplicissimus, Munich, May 21, 1918

Speaking of enemies the Germans weren't supposed to worry about, and as long as we happened to discuss Nicaragua last week: Gustav Brandt here offered his view of "the latest war announcements." Guatemala and Nicaragua declared war against Germany on April 23 and May 18 respectively.

"Guatemala and Nicaragua" by Gustav Brandt in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, May 26, 1918

I've given a literal translation of the dialogue below the cartoon, which is a near-quotation from Friedrich Schiller's Don Carlos. An English translation by R. D. Boyan paraphrases the original passage as

"Thus, arm-in-arm with thee, I dare defy
   The universal world into the lists."

...which is hardly any clearer. The line comes at the end of Act I, as the Marquis of Posa and young Don Carlos, Prince of Spain, profess their undying love for each other, as equals. Clearly, Brandt sees the relationship between Uncle Sam and the centroamericanos differently. U.S. marines had occupied Nicaragua since 1912, and the Guatemalan government was more or less a subsidiary of United Fruit Company.

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: Houses of Baloney

With the firing of James Comey the other day, it seems like ages ago that Donald Joffrey Trump issued his executive order on "religious liberty." Leading up to the signing, everyone expected the order to fulfill the theocratic right's wish list:  undermining marriage equality by creating a right for governmental officials, commercial entrepreneurs, landlords and anyone else to refuse service to same-sex couples; and allowing religious institutions to become a pitch-black money funding conduit for the Republican party.

What the theocrats got instead was a promise to get rid of the 1954 "Johnson Amendment" (named for then-Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, not the Johnson that Johnson complained was restricted by pants with too tight a crotch). Under the amendment, churches and other tax-exempt nonprofit organizations "are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office,"

The theocrats were greatly disappointed.

Here is the translation: religious leaders speaking from the pulpit have nothing to fear from the IRS if they speak about political issues unless they specifically endorse or oppose particular political candidates. Like all non-profit organizations with tax-exempt status, religious entities aren’t allowed to speak well or ill of individuals running for office. But the Johnson amendment precludes only this kind of talk; it does not bar preachers from holding forth on moral issues of the day. That has been the rule for decades. Mr Trump’s executive order merely repeats it.

So your pastor can preach the Gospel According to Making America Great Again all he wants; he just isn't supposed to preach the Gospel According to the Committee to Reelect Trump.

Big whoop, said culture warrior Mark Movsesian at First Things:

In fact, the IRS has given churches a lot of leeway when it comes to speaking out on political issues. As Ross Douthat tweeted last week, one could have followed law-and-religion debates for years and not heard a single complaint from conservatives about the unfair application of the Johnson Amendment, or an argument for removing the restriction on churches’ electioneering. It’s not an issue anyone was talking about.

Or, in the words of Princeton University Professor Robert P. George, the Johnson Amendment is "irrelevant, it’s offensive, it’s ignored by churches anyway."

Furthermore, the Johnson Amendment is an act of Congress, and as such can't be willed away by an executive order anyway. Not that the current Republican Congress wouldn't gladly revoke it: they could easily make sure that the Sierra Club or ACLU still had to obey the rule, but they might find it more difficult to keep the rule in effect for Black churches, liberal synagogues, and mosques of all stripes.

Avert Your Eyes

Oh, damn. Now I'll probably get sued.

Q Toon: Tolerating That Crap

We take a break from the presidential campaign to check what's going on in statehouses around the country:

"We're currently tracking 192 bills, the vast majority of which are anti-LGBT with major themes being trans bathrooms and rfras (religious freedom restoration acts) focused on marriage," Mark Daniel Snyder, spokesman for the Equality Federation, a gay rights group, told ABC News.

South Dakota Governor Dennis Daugaard (R-Of Course) is poised to sign the first of a wave of bills to keep transgender persons out of public rest rooms. North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory (R-Need You Ask?) wants his state to void the recent anti-discrimination ordinance passed in Charlotte on the grounds that no place in North Carolina should be allowed to be any more progressive than the most backwards backwoods hamlet.

Where established LGBT organizations have dropped the ball, it becomes necessary for tax-paying businesses to pitch in. Tech giants Facebook, Google, Apple and Yahoo have come down solidly in favor of LGBT rights; the pushback from firms such as PayPal and Salesforce were instrumental in getting Indiana to reconsider its "religious liberty" law last year.

Business leaders in Georgia are worried about a loss of film and convention business if the state's so-called "First Amendment Defense Act" protecting antigay discrimination is signed into law. Decatur, Georgia telecom firm 373K recently announced that it would pull up stakes and leave the state over the issue:

“I’m gay, our CFO is gay, we have people from every walk of life working here,” co-founder Kelvin Williams told [New Civil Rights Movement] on Saturday. “I’ve got Muslims, Buddhists, atheists here. We’ve got great Christians working for us. They’ve never thought of not serving anyone – that’s not the message of Christ.”
“We don’t tolerate that crap,” he added definitively.

Whose First Amendment First?

While I was away on vacation this month, there was a clash of competing First Amendment rights at the University of Missouri at Columbia. Because I was not closely following the news, I hadn't seen much about the racial tensions at UM-C that precipitated events; but I did see accounts of how the student athletes, by threatening to forfeit UM-C football games, forced the resignation of the university president and the chancellor.

But the protesters weren't done protesting -- although it turned out that they really objected to having their protest reported on:

First, a video surfaced of faculty, staff and students berating journalists and physically trying to remove a photographer from a public area on campus where protesters with the group Concerned Student 1950 set up a campsite.
Video showed the director of Greek Life, Janna Basler, screaming at a photographer to leave the area and later showed her and others physically forcing the journalist to back away from the campsite, even as the photographer noted his First Amendment right to be there. The same video showed an assistant professor of mass communications, Melissa Click, calling for "muscle" to help her eject the student journalist filming them and appeared to show her grabbing at his camera.

I'm too far removed to comment intelligently on the Mizzou protests, but I was reminded of a racially charged protest from my own college days 35 years ago.

The Political Activities Committee was the student group that arranged for public speakers to come to St. Olaf College to address students and answer questions in the chapel. Speakers during my years at St. Olaf included Nixon counsel John Dean, recent presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, South African journalist Donald Woods, the American Indian Movement's Vernon Bellecourt, and NAACP Executive Director Dr. Benjamin Hooks. Then, in the November of my senior year, they invited the recently overthrown Prime Minister of Rhodesia (since Zimbabwe), Ian Smith.

On the evening of Ian Smith's speech, protesters, some from largely Republican St. Olaf, and many from the much more liberal Carleton College across the river, armed with bullhorns and picket signs, took over the aisles of the chapel. Yelling accusations of murder against Smith and his racist regime for nearly an hour, they completely prevented the former head of state from speaking. [A classmate reminds me that the chant was "Ian Smith, you can't hide! We charge you with genocide!"]

That's my hand holding up the clipboard I'd brought to sketch on, there behind the fellow standing from East High. I was holding it up as a silent counter-protest, but others took up the idea and started adding to the raucous din by chanting "EE-NUFF! EE-NUFF!"

By that point, however, the original protesters had already succeeded in chasing Mr. Smith from the chapel to a small room in another building where the president of the Political Activities Committee had a one-on-one interview with the international pariah. Video of the interview was available to watch then next morning, and it was neatly summarized in the student newspaper.

But the rest of us who had questions we wanted to ask the disgraced former Prime Minister never got to ask them. So free speech won out that night, and free speech also lost.

Which is the way of things in an all-or-nothing environment. Whether it's so-called political correctness on campus, the politics of personal destruction, or a campaign season in which a candidate can propose having the U.S. government shut down places of worship and shadow everyone of that religious faith, and he can still be considered a front-runner, that's where we are today.

Q Toon: Rebranding the Tool

Q Syndicate✒Dec 11, 2014

This week's cartoon applies only in the states of California and New Jersey, plus the District of Columbia, where laws banning "reparative therapy" to change a minor’s sexual orientation “including efforts to change behaviors, gender identity or expression, or to reduce or eliminate sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward a person of the same sex or gender” have been signed into law. (Language from the D.C. bill.)

Court challenges by conversion therapy advocates to the California and New Jersey laws on the grounds that their exercise of religion was being infringed were both rejected. A court challenge to the D.C. law may be unnecessary, should the Republican Congress decide to step in. (Republicans talk a good game about "local control," but put them in charge of state and federal government, and they will not hesitate to make decisions about how big cities they don't live in ought to be run.)

Meanwhile, a similar laws failed to pass in New York, Maryland, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington in the latest biennium.

Twned this week: Fred Phelps & Clan

Personally, I don't think any caricature of the Westboro Baptist Church of Ghouls can ever possibly be mean enough.

Still, it's hard to argue that these miserable cretins do not have the rights of free speech guaranteed in the Constitution. Eventually, they will die and spend eternity serving their Lord of Hate; but until then, it is up to good-hearted people everywhere to exercise our own right of free speech to defend grieving funeral-goers from their vicious depravity.