Eyes on Julies

It's sabbath time again, so strap on your dust masks and join our Graphical History Tour as we rummage through my old cartoon files. What cherished treasures shall we find from Julies (that is the plural of July, isn't it?) of ten, twenty, thirty, and forty years ago?

for Q Syndicate, July, 2015

Ten Julies ago, the sovereign state of Texas spared no expense to monitor a U.S. military exercise named Jade Helm. A Russian disinformation campaign was apparently responsible for convincing Lone Star politicians that Jade Helm was part of some nefarious scheme by the Obama administration to round up political dissidents and ... I dunno, ship them off to an El Salvadoran concentration camp, I suppose.

Weeks before the exercise began, [Gov. Greg] Abbott wrote a letter to the State Guard asking them to keep an eye on the operation so “Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed.”

Undeterred by embarrassment over his overreaction to a routine military training exercise, Gov. Abbott and the Texas State Guard have been keeping a close eye on the current round-up of political dissidents, and the infringement of safety, constitutional rights, private property rights, and civil liberties in Texas and elsewhere.

Ain't sneakin' a dang thing past them folks, pardner.

Insert here your own tasteless flooding remark that gets you cancelled by the vast right-wing conspiracy.

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Digging back another ten years to July, 2005:

for Q Syndicate, July, 2005

Dancing up a storm, four-year-old Jack Roberts upstaged his father's nomination to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in July, 2005. With a Republican majority in the Senate sure to confirm the President George Dubya Bush nominee, right-wing judicial activists also rejoiced.

He was replacing the far-right William Rehnquist, nominated to the Court by Richard Nixon and elevated to Chief Justice by Ronald Reagan, so Roberts's nomination wasn't exactly a tear-out-your-hair-the-sky-is-falling moment for liberal interests.

As Circuit Court of Appeals Judge in 2003, John Roberts had pooh-poohed concerns over what he called "a hapless toad" in a lawsuit brought against the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service by a San Diego real estate developer whose planned housing development included breeding grounds of the arroyo southwestern toad. Roberts, dissenting from the Court of Appeals finding, agreed with the developer's argument that the toads had no connection to any economic or interstate activity and had no commercial value, so their protection was unrelated to interstate commerce and thus unconstitutional.

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in InStep, Milwaukee, July 20, 1995

This was my first cartoon in one of Wisconsin's LGBTQ+ newspapers. I didn't start drawing regularly for InStep ("Wisconsin's LesBiGay Newsmagazine") until a year later, so I wasn't yet listed as a columnist or contributor on the masthead.

Jesse Helms, for those of you too young to remember, was a virulently antigay Republican Senator from North Carolina. His racist and homophobic campaign ads cemented his national reputation as the Senate's leading culture warrior. He authored an amendment, passed with President Reagan's full support, to the 1987 AIDS appropriation bill, prohibiting the use of federal funding for any HIV/AIDS educational materials that would "promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities" served to exacerbate the spread of the disease.

He stubbornly opposed all federal spending on HIV/AIDS research in each and every budget cycle (hence my cartoon) throughout his Senate tenure. He retired in January, 2003, died in 2008, and I'm not sorry that he's gone.

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As it happens, I cannot find a single cartoon that I drew the entire month of July, 1985.

It's not for want of cartoonable news stories. At the time, I had discovered that while the local university newspaper was only too happy to have my editorial cartoons, daily newspapers around the country were, shall we say, a bit more discriminating in their tastes. With the UW-Parkside Ranger on summer hiatus, the impetus to keep drawing (particularly while maintaining a second-shift job that had nothing to do with publishing) just wasn't as urgent.

Since I have nothing of my own to show for the month, I'll close instead with a July, 1985 cartoon by Steve Benson, who succumbed this week to a devastating stroke that he suffered soon after retiring from the edtooning biz last year.

"Could You Describe Your Feelings" by Steve Benson in Arizona Republic, July, 1985

Benson, a grandson of former Agriculture Secretary cum Mormon Church President Ezra Taft Benson, started out his career during the Carter administration as a conservative. But by the time I met him, at the 2015 convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, he had gone fully left-wing libertarian, proselytizing atheist, and rabble rouser. 

At the 2015 AAEC convention panel "Free Speech or Hate Speech?" Per the October 2015 edition of AAEC's Notebook: "Steve Benson arose to pose the question he was asked by one of his editors. If he were to do a Muhammad cartoon, he would be putting himself at risk—but also every other staff member of his newspaper (Arizona Republic). By what right was he entitled to endanger everyone around him?" I remember it as having been a much longer question.

By all accounts, he held strong opinions, and wasn't the least bit shy about sharing them at length. His conversion from right to left and from religious to atheist must have been a seismic shock to those who lived and worked closely with him.

I was not one of them. I wish I had had the opportunity to get to know him better, but by the time I finally made it to another AAEC convention, he had stopped attending them — permanently, as it turned out. I don't know why.

Maybe it's not exactly appropriate to wish Rest In Peace to someone who rejected the whole idea of any sort of afterlife, but... well... So long. Peace out.

And thanks for giving us hope that not all conservatives are lost souls.

Hold My Hand And I'll Take You There

Welcome aboard today's Graphical History Tour, offering a self-serving selection of my own cartoons from Mays in years ending in -five.

Since Grifter-in-Chief Donald Frequent Flyer Trump has just returned from the Arabian peninsula with his very own private pleasure dome in the sky, our first stop is deep in the heart of Texas, twenty years ago:

for Q Syndicate, May, 2005

Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah visited President George W. Bush at his Crawford Ranch (in April, actually), and Americans were taken aback seeing our president holding the crown prince's hand as they walked to Casa de Dubya.

This was less than four years after 9/11, and it was well known that several of the terrorists who took over the planes were Saudi nationals. But the Bush administration had committed to overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and needed acquiescence of the other powers in the region.

It Abdullah, who reigned as the Saudi King from August, 2005 until his death in January of 2015, is an uncle of the present Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. 

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., May 2, 1985

Skipping back another twenty years: West Wing staffers regard meetings with foreign heads of state as an opportunity to burnish a president's stature as a world leader. But even carefully planned events can misfire.

President Ronald Reagan had come under criticism after a meeting of the G-7 in West Germany. To mark the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, Chancellor Helmut Kohl persuaded Reagan aides to schedule a side trip to a cemetery in Bitburg where some 2,000 German soldiers were buried. Reagan's Deputy Chief of Staff made a preliminary visit to the cemetery in February, where he failed to notice 49 grave markers for members of the Waffen-SS.

Politicians and Jewish leaders in Europe and the U.S. urged Reagan to cancel the Bitburg trip; instead the White House added a stop at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to Reagan's itinerary. A spokesman for children of Holocaust survivors, Menachem Rosensaft, spoke for those not mollified: “By entering Bitburg, [Reagan and Kohl] desecrate the memory of all those who were murdered by the SS, and of all those whom they pretended to commemorate here at Belsen.”

By the way, the "584" marker by my signature was my mistake. May is kind of late to still be writing the previous year on cartoons, checks, and other documents — especially since I didn't have old age as an excuse forty years ago.

Let's come forward to 1995 and some domestic issues:

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, May 4, 1995

Politicians have been telling us for more than thirty years that Medicare and Social Security are heading to hell in a handbasket. The Republican plan has been to get rid of them entirely without getting rid of them at all — basically by making the benefits from them smaller and smaller and more difficult to get.

At the same time, they stoke seniors' resentment of paying taxes for schools well after their own children have walked away with diplomas funded by senior citizens of earlier generations.

for bergetoons.blogspot.com, the internet, May, 2015

Jumping ahead to May of 2015, we return to the Lone Star State, where conspiracy fabulists were all hot and bothered about a U.S. Army training exercise called "Jade Helm" — which apparently enlisted Walmart basements in a secret government plot to overthrow the government of Texas. Accordingly, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor and report the nefarious activities of them darn Yankees.

At the same time, the Texas legislature passed a law preventing localities from regulating fracking, but what is really at issue here is this: Governor Abbott has had ten fracking years to get to the bottom of this "Jade Helm" conspiracy, most of them with the full backing and support of Republicans and Qanoncompoops in charge of the federal government.

And somehow he has failed to reveal anything about the Jade Helm Conspiracy.

Which can only mean one thing: Texas Governor Greg Abbott is himself part of the Jade Helm Conspiracy to overthrow the government of Texas!

More on this story as it continues failing to develop.

Q Toon: DEI ex Mockery

I told my editors I was looking for a cartoon topic this week that wouldn't be about the GOP.

But if you've been paying any attention to the news over the past couple of years, you know which party has decided that DEI — i.e., Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — is academia's latest threat to their homogenous worldview. Inspired by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas's Greg Abbott, it's Republicans who can't abide diversity, detest equity, and loathe inclusion.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox even called them "bordering on evil."

Last year, Republicans in Madison in my home state held up funding for the University of Wisconsin until the school knuckled under to their demands to stifle DEI: 

Shortly after the Universities of Wisconsin accepted a GOP offer to approve UW raises and building projects in exchange for new limits on campus diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos [R-Burlington] had a message. The move, he said, was just a first step in the GOP’s efforts to eliminate DEI. ...

“We finally have turned the corner and gotten real reforms enacted,” Vos said. “Republicans know this is just the first step in what will be our continuing efforts to eliminate these cancerous DEI practices on UW campuses.”

Instead, University regents had to promise to raise funds to establish a new campus leadership position to promote "conservative political thought."

Elsewhere, Republicans this year have proposed 50 bills in 20 states to limit or eliminate DEI programs at agencies that receive state funding. 

This is the second year Republican-led state governments have targeted DEI. This year’s bills, as well as executive orders and internal agency directives, again focus heavily on higher education. But the legislation also would limit DEI in K-12 schools, state government, contracting and pension investments. Some bills would bar financial institutions from discriminating against those who refuse to participate in DEI programs.

When Republicans in Congress opened a hearing titled "Divisive, Excessive, Ineffective: The Real Impact of DEI on College Campuses," Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) countered, "DEI offices exist to address student needs, to give strategic support to faculty [and] institutional leaders, to identify hurdles and assist faculty and staff in serving, educating and meeting the needs of increasingly diverse populations, many of whom are first-generation college students."

That hearing was chaired by Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT), who called DEI "a cancer that resides in the hearts of American academic institutions."

Bonamici questioned why Republicans felt a hearing on DEI was more important than forums on pressing topics like campus hunger or students’ civil rights. She also criticized as offensive Owens’s decision to compare DEI to cancer—though Owens was quick to point out that he, in fact, had survived prostate cancer.

Robin Vos, as far as I know, does not have that excuse. He just adheres to the same talking points memo.

Toon: Border Line

We interrupt today's regularly scheduled Sneak Peek to bring you this special breaking cartoon:

The Senate is reportedly poised to pass a bipartisan, hardline anti-immigration bill in answer to the surge of refugees crossing our southern border. It's an issue that Republicans, especially in Texas and Arizona, have been telling us for years must be addressed forthwith.

But Donald Trump told his minions in the House to vote down whatever bill came out of the Senate, no matter how urgent a crisis we have at the border, because he wants to run on the issue this year. 

Aside from wreaking revenge upon his personal enemies, it's the only issue he's got.

So of course, Speaker Mike Johnson, with his ephemeral two-vote majority, dutifully promised that the House would not consider any border security bill, regardless of what is in it, even if the entire population of Latin America comes charging across the Rio Grande during the next twelve months flinging fentanyl at passers-by and forcing your children to marcar dos para español. 

After all, Governor Abbott can just declare war on our southern neighbors and send the Lone Star State Air Force to commence bombing at will, can't he?

Q Toon: Pride 2023

I like to come up with an LGBTQIA+ Pride themed cartoon in time for monthly publications' June issues. This year, it just feels impossible to come up with anything upbeat, let alone funny.

Pride celebrations have been cancelled in several Florida communities this year due to the "hostile environment" created by Governor Ron DeSantis and his legislature's intentionally vague law criminalizing drag performances. 

Florida is by no means alone in promulgating DeSantis-style Cancel Culture. Event organizers have cancelled similar celebrations in Kansas, and organizers are concerned that a legislation in Tennessee may yet force them to cancel events in Memphis and Knoxville.

The onslaught of viciously anti-LGBTQ legislation being regurgitated from one red state to the next makes this a bleak Pride season. 

Who knew that we would come to miss the crass Pride Merch commercialism of 1992 to 2016?

Q Toon: Tedious

It seems like eons ago that we coined the term "Obama Derangement Syndrome" to describe Republicans' irrational, virulent response to anything and everything about Barack Obama: from their embrace of birtherism even in the face of overwhelming evidence that our 44th President was indeed born in Hawaii, to their revulsion against his wife planting a vegetable garden, to their howls of shock and horror that time he wore a tan suit.

When the electoral college elected as president Donald Berzelius Trump, the most prominent flogger of birtherism's dead horse, right-wingers quickly purloined the idea of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" — as if there were something pathological about Americans being upset over having our country run by a solipsistic, self-serving, lying, cheating, boorish grifter who was using the presidency as a Keep Out Of Jail Free card while billing taxpayers to put up the Secret Service in his own personal hotel chain.

So, now that the party that was just fine and dandy with all that is now falling all over itself proclaiming transgender folks to be the biggest danger to the republic since affordable health care, I'm stealing "Derangement Syndrome" back.

Q Toon: Above All, D'Oh!

While liberals (and not only a few conservatives) were celebrating the defeat of Trumpism at the ballot box last week, right-wingers were able to celebrate the triumph of Trumpism in the courts.

Trump appointee Matthew Kacsmaryk struck down a Biden administration ruling that LGBTQ+ patients were covered under Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) protections against discrimination. The Obama administration had also stipulated these protections for LGBTQ+ patients, only to have them erased by the corrupt Trump administration.

Kacsmaryk's ruling came in a case brought by a pair of doctors — medical professionals, mind you — who think providing professional medical care to transgender patients is icky; and so, backed by a right-wing legal activist group looking for any way to destroy the Affordable Care Act, they went to court.

Now, if you're a transgender person, and you're looking for a doctor, you probably shouldn't go to a doctor who personally objects to treating transgender people. It's highly unlikely that such a doctor has bothered to learn anything about the medical needs peculiar to transgender patients. You might as well ask your ophthalmologist to perform root canal surgery.

But we're talking about Texas here: home to vast, wide open spaces sparsely populated by people who think that Ted Cruz is a marvelous senator. You may not have a lot of choices when looking for a doctor there.

Texas, moreover, is ruled by a Republican Party from Governor Abbott on down who are determined to make health care for transgender persons a crime; so even if you've had a country doctor who is considerate and caring (they call that "woke" in these parts), the best she can do is refer you to someplace out of state. 

If the statehouse hasn't already made that illegal, too. 

Q Toon: Definition of Character

Yes, folks: even the dictionary is suspect in Florida schools.

A school district in Florida could not accept a donation of dictionaries amid a new state law aimed at combating "wokeness" in classrooms.

The Venice Suncoast Rotary Club was prepared to give its annual donation of dictionaries to the Sarasota County Schools ahead of the new school year. But the district stopped all donations and purchases of books for school libraries until at least next year.

This came after HB 1467 took effect in July. The law requires school districts to have all reading and instructional materials reviewed by a district employee with a "valid educational media specialist certificate." ...

The Venice Suncoast Rotary Club told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune that they have donated about 300 dictionaries a year. After donating a total of 4,000 dictionaries to date, this is the first time they were denied.

I'm sure that Gubbner DeSantis will call this an overreaction; but since this anti-wokeness purge is an overreaction in the first place, surely an abundance of caution is called for.

After all, Florida and Texas have rejected math textbooks for not adhering to right-wing orthodoxy. If Johnny has seven apples and gives Susie two, that sounds too much like socialism.

Meanwhile, North Carolina's ignoramus Lieutenant Governor thinks that teaching history and science in elementary schools is dangerous, so they're verboten, too. 

(Don't even let's get started on foreign language education...)

And in Oklahoma, an English teacher was disciplined for displaying a QR code for the Brooklyn Library to their class – not assigning any subversive literature or putting actual books on the shelf, just letting their class know how to find books for themselves. Initial reports said they were fired, although the school district later said it was expecting them to return to class the next day pending a review of the incident. Instead, they quit.

For all the right-wing blather about leftist thought police demanding "political correctness" and coddling liberal snowflakes, it turns out that it's those right-wing thought police imposing their own political correctness by force of law.

Who's the snowflakes now?

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Although my original intention had always been to draw the stars of this week's cartoon in puritan outfits, I toyed with the idea of continuing a reference from a couple weeks ago by drawing Ron DeSantis in Spanish Inquisition garb.

I rejected that idea for two reasons. First, I didn't think that a cardinal's hat and cassock would be recognizable in grayscale. There is only one newspaper that I know of that still prints my cartoons that way, but it's worth taking it into account.

Second, it would mean having to clothe the third speaker in the uniform of a third rigidly intolerant stereotype. The most obvious would be an Iranian mullah or Afghan Taliban; but as Patrick Chappatte and others have found, some people interpret such depictions as a slam against Islam as a whole.

As a gay man and a feminist, I find antigay, misogynist Islamic fundamentalism reprehensible. And certainly, the targets of my cartoon would be more annoyed by being compared to the Taliban than to the Pilgrims. Yet anti-Asian hate is a real thing, and one does have to take care not to feed into that. 

Editorial cartooning often involves drawing how This is like That, even though This and That are completely separate things. In the end, however, I decided that there was no need to draw our home-grown christofascisti as non-Christians. I may well revisit the DeSantis Inquisition someday. But for now, I think I'll stick to drawing imams and the Taliban when I'm actually criticizing imams and the Taliban.

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Oh, by the way, dear reader, since you've read this far, I won't make you look it up:

Q Toon: Driven to Distruction

 

So I've finally gotten a cartoon drawn about the arrest almost two weeks ago of the 31 white heterosexuosupremacists in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. With them in their van were plans to attack the LGBTQ+ Pride event underway there that weekend.

Eric Ward, executive director of the Western States Center, a community organizing group that advocates for inclusivity and democratic principles, said [the planned attack was] a far cry from an isolated incident.

“People should be paying attention to these arrests far beyond Coeur d’Alene,” Ward said via email. “Idaho is a bellwether state for where the rest of the country may be headed in terms of how anti-democracy groups try to build power and how effectively they’re blunted.” He noted that in 2020, Idaho was among the first states to “turn anti-transgender attacks into law” by banning trans women and girls from school sports and that the local Republican Party has supported candidates for the library board who ran on pulling LGBTQ books from shelves.

Republican politicians have been whipping up these amateur fascists with a constant drumbeat of anti-LGBTQ+, anti-immigrant, racist, pro-violence rhetoric and legislation. Their ranting seems especially heated this year, but it has been going on for decades now, amplified by their cheerleaders and coaches at Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, and social media echo chambers.

Perhaps I should have identified the politicians in the lower panel of this cartoon. I've drawn about some of them before; Idaho Governor Brad Little is a newcomer here, however. 

The Idaho House passed legislation in March that would criminalize gender-affirming medical treatment for minors, tacking it onto existing laws banning female genital mutilation. The state Senate refused to take up the bill, thus saving Gov. Little from having to sign or veto it.

As for the rest of the motley crew in my cartoon, we've already discussed Texas Governor Greg Abbott's executive order classifying transgender therapy as child abuse, the "Don't Say Gay" law signed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Congresstroll Lauren Boebert's malice against colleagues' transgender children, Ohio's pending bill, and Reprehensible Marjorie Taylor-Greene's anti-LGBTQ+ rantings and ravings. I just haven't gotten around to those same policies in Alabama, Arizona, and a host of other GQP-run states. 

That, along with their racist appeals to get "Critical Race Theory" — an academic topic on the level of multivariate calculus and quantum physics — out of public elementary schools is exactly what drives neoNazis like these "Patriot Front" lunatics to think they must save the White Cis Male Race from replacement by colored transgender wimminfolk.

Heck, I certainly understand the appeal of the LGBTQ+ experience.

Is it that attractive to everyone? Probably not.

But you can't tell that to the idiots in the U-Haul. They're listening to someone else.

[J]ust as police must contend with the growth of extremist groups, the public must pay attention to the elected officials and personalities in the mainstream who ignite the talking points that ultimately animate far-right groups.

When they see a mainstream politician pick up on something they agree with, they see that as validation,” [Kurt Braddock, a professor at American University] said of false claims some Republican lawmakers have made about trans people being “groomers” and “pedophiles.” “Just like the ‘great replacement theory,’ it trickles down to the far-right elements and they run with it.”

Q Toon: Wanted!

Not content with persecuting transgender citizens, Republicans in charge of Texas law enforcement are itching to criminalize being the parent of a transgender child.

Anti-trans rhetoric in Texas has grown louder in the past few weeks. Attorney General Ken Paxton ... issued an opinion that likened gender-affirming surgery — a procedure that gives transgender people a body that aligns with their gender identity — to child abuse.

Days later, Gov. Greg Abbott doubled down with a letter calling on professionals, including teachers and doctors, to report parents who give their children gender-affirming care. The letter added that there would be similar reporting requirements for the general public, and consequences for those who don't report.

Abbott's letter directed the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services and other state agencies to investigate certain gender-affirming services as child abuse.

Anti-transgender legislation has been tearing through "red states" like wildfire; so while the Paxton opinion and Abbott's letter do not carry the full force of law, it hardly seems like much of a stretch to imagine the Texas legislature taking this horrible idea and running with it. 

Nor is it a stretch to imagine them modeling legislation after their infamous new anti-abortion law, inviting parties with no present legal standing to step in and sue the parents, the Uber driver who takes the family to the clinic, the receptionist who lets them in, and of course, all medical and counseling professionals along the way.

This in spite of recent studies which find that access to gender-affirming care significantly reduces the risk in transgender and non-binary youth of depression and suicide.

But after all, it's an election year, and beating up on transgender folks really brings out the Republican base.

Becoming more base every day.

Q Toon: School Safety Drill

Faced with a fourth surge of the coronavirus sweeping the nation, Republican governors and legislators have been falling over each other to see which of them can do the best job of channeling Amity Island Mayor Larry Vaughn.

A number of them have acted to forbid school districts and state universities from taking the simplest measures to ensure the health and safety of students and staff. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has threatened to cut funding to any school district that requires students to wear masks in the classroom. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued his own executive order to the same effect. Republicans running the Wisconsin state legislature want the University of Wisconsin to beg for the politicians' permission before making any COVID-19-related decisions whatsoever.

Even Alabama Governor Kay "Start Blaming the Unvaccinated Folks" Ivey says there's no reason why a couple dozen children too young to be vaccinated should be required to mask up just because they are cooped up in a classroom together for hours at a time five days a week for months on end. It's Alabama. They can open a window.

I suppose Tennessee teachers and students should be grateful that Governor Bill Lee is willing to leave responding to the COVID-19 crisis up to individual school systems. Tennessee Republicans have their hands full trying to keep transgender students out of school bathrooms and locker rooms, and are too busy to play Doctor like the other legislatures.

And South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is probably preoccupied making sure that the Sturgis Bike Week Superspreader Rally goes off without a hitch. And maybe running for president, or at least to fill Sarah Palin's shoes. She's kind of tired of all this coronavirus stuff, and she thinks you are, too.

So let's all go swimming! Statistically, your chances of being attacked by a shark are actually very small. And most people who are attacked by sharks survive, don't they?

Q Toon: The Eyes of Texas

Here I thought over the weekend, as I settled at my drawing board to work on this week's Q Syndicate cartoon, that I'd be able to get ahead of the news cycle by drawing about Texas's "Bathroom Bill," which was passed by the state Senate late Tuesday night, 21 to 20.

Well, thanks to the Twit in the White House, there's a much bigger LGBT issue dominating the news cycle.

In a series of three tweets, written in more formal language than we are accustomed to seeing from him, mercurial American President Donald "Bone Spur" Trump abruptly halted the Pentagon's progress toward welcoming transgender service men and women in the U.S. military.

“After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow ... Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming ... victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you”

As others have pointed out, the "tremendous medical costs" of transgender service members are dwarfed by the medical cost in our military budget of boner pills. Since the estimates of the numbers of transgender service members vary widely, their "medical costs" to the military range widely as well -- but it's still only .001% of the Pentagon's overall budget.

By analyzing private health insurance data on gender transition-related expenditures, (such as hormone therapy or surgical treatment, for instance), researchers found that Military Health System costs could increase by $2.4 million and $8.4 million per year if it were extended to cover the estimated 1,320 to 6,630 transgender people in the military. This amount pales in comparison to the Department of Defense's $49.3 billion health care expenditures in 2014, for example, and would represent between 0.005% to 0.017% of the department's overall health care costs, according to the study.
Overall, the study estimated that only 29–129 service members would seek gender transition–related care per year, and 30 to 140 personnel would seek hormone therapy. Another 25 to 130 personnel would seek surgical treatment.

Perhaps Mr. Trump – or Mike Pence, or one of those hand-laying evangelicals from last week, or whoever had spoken to Donald Duce last – has his panties in a wad that once the U.S. military opens itself to transgender recruits, gender reassignment surgery will suddenly rocket in popularity from sea to shining sea.

Ahem. This blog post was supposed to be about the Texas Bathroom Bill, and I've practically ignored the topic altogether.

Another tweet, this one from comedian Mark Agee, brings the two topics back together:

"Sorry I was led to believe that trans people were so skilled in combat that I should fear being alone in a bathroom with them."

As the newsmedia cover Trump's ban, members of the Texas legislature might want to keep in mind that those manly guys being interviewed as representatives of transgender soldiers and veterans are the very men that Senate Bill 3 requires to use the ladies' room. Your womenfolk are not going to appreciate that.

The line for the ladies' room is long enough.

Q Toon: End Around

The Donald Joffrey Trump administration announced this week that whether or not transgender students can safely pee in school lavatories should be up to state legislatures to decide. So let's take a look at how that's going, shall we?

Republicans in the state of Texas are pushing Senate Bill 6, the Lone Star version of North Carolina's phenomenally unsuccessful Bathroom Bill to require men who were born female to use the ladies' room and women who were born male to use the men's room. As in North Carolina, SB6 is aimed at overturning local ordinances and school policies protecting transgender rights.

The National Football League and National Basketball Association have come out against Texas's "Bathroom Bill," warning that if any bill seen as "discriminatory or inconsistent with our values were to become law there, that would certainly be a factor considered when thinking about awarding future events."

With a potential loss of hundreds of millions in sports revenue, Texas Governor Greg Abbott shot back, "We don't care what the NFL thinks and certainly what their political policies are because they are not a political arm of the state of Texas or the United States of America. They need to learn their place in the United States, which is to govern football, not politics.”

Y'all remember when Thomas Jefferson about the wall of separation between sports and state.

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and bill supporter Sen. Dawn Buckingham (R-Austin) protested that sports venues are exempt from SB6. Maybe.

When asked whether businesses and sporting venues would definitely be exempt, [Buckingham] added, "Well, we'll see what the language looks like, but it's my understanding that that's the intent — to realize that there are some complicating factors there and our priorities are really the schools."

Sports organizations may be the most prominent opponents of the legislation, but they are not alone. Major investment firms have also warned Texas of their opposition to the bill.

"As professional investors, we know that discrimination is simply bad for business," Matthew Patsky, CEO of Trillium Asset Management, which signed the letter, told the teleconference.

A coalition of Texas convention and tourism leaders predicts a short-term GDP losses of $8 billion in revenue. Bob Jameson, president and CEO of the Fort Worth Convention and Visitors Bureau, worries that the impact to his city alone could be massive:

"Business and leisure tourism delivers a $2 billion economic impact each year in Fort Worth and supports more than 20,000 jobs. An important driver behind that is our friendly hospitality and a strong message that all are welcome here. We want to maintain that.”

“Restroom laws are one of the top policy deterrents for planning conventions, conferences and meetings,” said Deborah Sexton, president and CEO of the Professional Convention Management Association. “Our industry holds 1.83 million meetings annually and brings $28 billion in U.S. federal, state and local taxes annually; with more than $280 billion in annual U.S. direct spending spurred by our sector. Should SB6 be signed into law, you ensure Texas’s future percentage of these taxes and spending will exponentially be reduced.”

Q Toon: Finding the Perfect Tone

I ran across somebody's complaint recently about focusing so much LGBT attention on the bathroom clauses of these bathroom bills in North Carolina, Mississippi, and elsewhere. We're not paying enough heed, the argument went, to the "religious liberty" clauses creating the right of wedding photographers, bakers and florists, not to mention therapists, pharmacists paramedics, and tow truck operators to discriminate against gays, lesbians, and bisexuals.

To which oversight, I suppose, transgender persons must sympathize. Through the years they've been quietly dropped from various efforts to win LGB folks rights to equal employment, military service, marriage, and so on.

So, anyway, I've managed to include the bakers and florists in panel one.

In my home state of Wisconsin, state representative Jesse Kremer, R-Kewaskum, has reintroduced his bathroom bill, claiming that it's purely needed to criminalize the heretofore legal activity of sexually assaulting children in public bathrooms, and that it isn't aimed at transgender lavatory customers at all.

"There have been individuals in society for hundreds of years that believe they are a different gender. That's not the problem here," Kremer said. "The problem is that there are going to be people that are going to take advantage of the situation."

His protestations might carry more weight if we hadn't been equally assured that Republicans' voter ID laws had nothing to do with thwarting Democratic voters, and that Act 10 had nothing to do with breaking unions. We've become inured to the repeated spectacle of Governor Snotwalker telling us some right-wing agenda item is "not a priority" only to have him sign it into law within the week. I just can't believe you guys. Ever.

🚽

Nationally, Kremer and his ilk are the same people who complain that their rights are being trampled upon if someone wishes them Happy Holidays or offers them the choice of whether or not to marcar dos para español. Keep that in mind whenever they pretend that their efforts to write discrimination into the law have nothing to do with the people they want to discriminate against.

Toon: Messin' With Texas

Paul Berge Q Syndicate✒May 8, 2015 EditorialCartoonists.com

 

Deep in the heart of Texas, folks are all riled up that a U.S. Army training exercise called "Jade Helm" -- and apparently Walmart basements -- are somehow part of a government plot to overthrow the government of Texas. Accordingly, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R-Naturally) ordered the Texas State Guard to keep an eye on them darn Yankees.

Some websites paraded a PowerPoint presentation — marked unclassified — as evidence that Army Special Operations Command was training to suppress American rebels in a coming military coup or civil war....
Theories have tied in elements beyond the slides depicting the exercise. "FEMA death domes" — purportedly being built as detention hubs for detained American insurgents — had already been absorbed into the martial law/coup conspiracy theory.
Some have now implicated Walmart, citing the retailer's sudden temporary closure of five of its more than 4,000 U.S. stores, including two in Texas. As noted Wednesday by Texas Monthly, some theorize the stores are being appropriated by the government for use as bases during martial law.

Meanwhile, the Texas legislature has also passed a bill prohibiting local governments from doing anything to regulate fracking in their communities.

Texas moved Monday to ban its own cities from imposing prohibitions on hydraulic fracturing and other potentially environmentally harmful oil and natural gas drilling activities within their boundaries – a major victory for industry groups and top conservatives who have decried rampant local “over-regulation.”

The bill last month overwhelmingly cleared the House, which Republicans control by a 2-to-1 margin, and passed the GOP-dominated Senate almost as easily Monday – sending it to Gov. Greg Abbott, who is expected to sign it into law. ...

Lawmakers in America’s largest oil-producing state scrambled to limit local energy exploration prohibitions after Denton, a university town near Dallas, passed an ordinance in November against hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, attempting to keep encroaching drilling bonanzas outside their community.