Q Toon: Stacy Garrity Explains It All

I haven't seen much interest from national media in Pennsylvania's gubernatorial election this year; incumbent Governor Josh Shapiro is widely expected to win reelection handily. But since publications in both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh run my cartoons, I decided to show the Keystone State a little love this week.

The Republican nominee for governor there is State Treasurer Stacy Garrity, who, I will admit up front, has reportedly been doing a very good job at her present post. As a colonel in the Army Reserve, Garrity was a whistle-blower at Camp Bucca in Iraq, exposing abuses of prisoners and inhumane conditions.

On the other hand, she is a full-on MAGA Trumpster who advocated throwing out Pennsylvanians' votes in 2020 because they went for local boy Joe Biden over the grifter from Mar-a-Lardo. She's anti-choice on abortion rights, a COVID skeptic who protested houses of worship getting closed when other public gathering places were also shutting their doors. 

Spotlight PA, which identifies as "an independent, nonpartisan, and nonprofit newsroom producing investigative and public-service journalism that holds power to account and drives positive change in Pennsylvania," tried to get Garrity to respond to its questions on issues of interest to LGBTQ+ Pennsylvanians, but received only a terse, almost rude reply from a campaign aide.

Garrity’s campaign did not respond to a list of questions from Spotlight PA, including one asking her to elaborate on her position on same-sex marriage. Other questions included whether she would support nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ Pennsylvanians; if healthcare providers should be able to assert religious or moral objections to turn people away; what she thinks of legislation to ban instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation in elementary classrooms; or if her administration would maintain a policy discouraging licensed providers and commercial insurers from conducting conversion therapy.

Instead, a spokesperson shared the following statement from Garrity: “We are all children of God, and every person regardless of their race, their gender, or their sexual orientation should be treated with dignity and respect. Period. Full stop.”

Marriage equality is, at least for now, the law of the land; but a heteros-only Definition of Marriage Act remains in Pennsylvania's statutes in case the Trump Supreme Court were to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges. Transgender persons are a favorite target of Republican politicians these days, and "religious liberty" advocates still want to be able to discriminate against LGBTQ+ patients, customers, renters, and neighbors.

Of  course, our issues are not the dominant ones in Pennsylvania this year. As in many other races around the country, the top campaign issues are affordability, data centers, and saving democracy from the other party. 

And by the way, there's a war on, or off, or on again. Or maybe it's splunge.

Happy Constitution Day (while it lasts)!

Of Graham Bondage

Since last week's Graphical History Tour memorialized a sitting U.S. Senator who claims not to be dead, this week's episode rustles up my cartoons about one of his Republican colleagues whose passing is less, ah, speculative.

April, 2010

Lindsey Graham himself barely appeared in what I believe was my first cartoon about him, sixteen years ago. An anti-immigrant Tea Partisan then from South Carolina, William Gheen, alleged that Senator Lindsey Graham was being blackmailed over his widely rumored homosexual orientation to support Democrats' version of Immigration Reform.

"Sen. Graham, you need to come forward and tell people about your alternative lifestyle and your homosexuality. Come out of that closet, Lindsey. Come out of that Log Cabin closet," Gheen told a Tea Party Klatch. "Look, I'm a tolerant person. I don't care about your private life, Lindsey. But as our U.S. Senator, I need to figure out why you're trying to sell out your own countrymen, and I need to make sure your being gay isn't it."

Whether in response to Gheen or not, Graham announced that he opposed the immigration bills proposed by the Democratic majority in Congress. As for Gheen, he has since migrated across the border to North Carolina, where he is President of an anti-immigration political action committee.

December, 2012

I drew this cartoon in response to Graham advocating against achieving marriage equality by congressional legislation or litigation in the courts.

Graham knew full well how unlikely getting a pro-marriage equality amendment to the U.S. Constitution approved by Congress and ratified by 34 state legislatures would be. For years, Republicans pushed an amendment to do exactly the opposite, not to mention other amendments for all sorts of their pet peeves, without getting anywhere. 

October, 2014

Did you know that Lindsey Graham ran for the Republicans' 2016 presidential nomination? Even people who were paying close attention at the time may not remember it.

Graham was running for a third term in the Senate in 2014, and told Politico that in the (inevitable) event that he won reelection, he was considering looking into a 2016 presidential run. He made his official campaign announcement on June 1, 2015, but failed to qualify for a Republican presidential debate cattle call on CNN two months later.

The highlight of his presidential campaign was calling Donald Trump "a jackass" in successive interviews on CNN and CBS. Trump responded by telling Fox & Fiends viewers Graham's personal cell phone number.

By Christmas, Graham had suspended his campaign; he then endorsed Florida Governor Jeb Bush in January. Republican voters didn't listen.

October, 2018

Neither did the Electoral College.

As Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham played a prominent role in the confirmation of Donald Trump's Supreme Court appointees. Allegations that the second of them, Brett Kavanaugh, was a beer-swilling bro in college suggested the "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" character Brick to me; casting Graham as Maggie followed as a matter of course.

That's Senators Maizie Hirono and Jeff Flake as Mae and Gooper (well, I needed somebody in those roles) and Trump as Big Daddy Pollitt.

March, 2021

Insinuating Lindsey Graham's Kinsey rating couldn't be the point of every cartoon I put him in. Sometimes, he was just a recognizable Senator to populate a cartoon about the Senate Republican Caucus. But as the supposedly closeted gay one, he afforded me the opportunity to draw a cartoon about a non-LGBTQ+ topic for the LGBTQ+ publications that run my cartoons. 

(Openly bi Senator Kyrsten Sinema also figured in this one. A two-fer!)

February, 2021

In the post for this week's cartoon, I included Lindsey Graham's "Count me out" comment on the evening after the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, disassociating himself from Donald Trump. I also included Trump's more recent story of Graham then calling him up to apologize.

You certainly can't take Trump's word for anything, but Graham counting himself out on January 6 did not extend to his voting to convict Trump when the Senate voted on his impeachment trial on February 13.

Graham just couldn't stay mad at his latest infatuation.

September, 2022

Republicans who bothered at all to explain their votes against conviction claimed that since Trump was out of office, his attempt to overthrow the government should be a matter for the courts rather than the impeachment process.

As the prosecution of Trump for offenses starting with January 6, tax fraud, and sexual assault crept ever so slowly forward during Joe Biden's presidency, Lindsey Graham and quite a few other Republicans complained that pursuing justice in the courts was a bad idea, too.

In the fall of 2022, Citizen Trump was refusing to return classified papers included among dozens of bankers boxes of files he had spirited off to Mar-a-Lago, directing underlings to hide them away when the FBI showed up to seize them. Graham warned that if Trump were ever brought to trial for those actions, his hordes of MAGA minions would reprise January 6.

To his dying day, Graham was mute about any possibility of Antifa, DEI, or Woke Inc., getting violent over what now passes for the Justice Department's overtly political, Trumped up prosecutions of anyone who has ever crossed Donald Trump.

Q Toon: Remembering Barney Frank

I promised to draw a memorial cartoon for the late Congressman Barney Frank, the first gay member of Congress to out himself, and here it is. 

The quotation in my cartoon is from a January 12, 2009 New Yorker article by Jeffrey Toobin, and it's a slightly condensed version of a statement Barney Frank had made on the House floor the previous March.

It's important to point out that in 2009, none of the rights he was advocating for — marriage equality, the end of "Don't Ask Don't Tell," or Employment Non-Discrimination — were yet the law of the land. And none of them came about by acts of Congress, meaning that any of them could be negated by an antigay president, Supreme Court, or Secretary of Whatever They're Calling What We're Doing In Iran These Days.

Barney Frank made these statements in response to Republicans who charged that advocating these rights was "radical" (a boiler plate response by Republicans to any Democratic proposal, even those that borrow from Republican ones).

But Frank was an incrementalist, which resulted in attacks from the idealists and purists to his left. Transgender advocates are still upset by his willingness to excise them from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) in order to get Congress to pass workplace protections for lesbians, gays, and bisexuals — a ploy that failed anyway.

He was defensive about that in his final interview, with Lou Chibarro, Jr. in Washington Blade, but confident that the protections afforded by Bostock v. Clayton County would stand:

Blade: Are you saying we may not need an LGBTQ non-discrimination act by Congress for the states that haven’t passed that?

Frank: I would be in favor of that, yes. But again, I think you and I – you have always been pessimistic. There is a political time now that works in our favor. And as I said, on abortion, they burned themselves very badly on abortion. And yes, I’m still for a national anti-discrimination bill. But I do not think the right wing wants to be caught taking rights away that already exist. Because that’s a lot harder than denying them in the first place. And I don’t see any movement for that. You tell me what you are worried about. What bills are you worried about? 

Blade: I was simply saying they haven’t yet passed a federal non-discrimination bill. 

Frank: No, what’s going to change on the Supreme Court? I don’t see a pretty quick reversal on the Supreme Court. So, I think people are just – they have to have a cause. And they are inflating the likelihood that we are going to lose some rights when I see no evidence of it. And in fact, I see a lot of political reasons why those in Congress don’t want to do that.

Perhaps he was correct that "people's rights to get married, join the army, and make a living" are mainstream values now.

That assumes that there is a "mainstream" any more.

"The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left's on the internet, and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality." ― Barney Frank

The First Month of Black History Week

Today's Graphical History Tour should have been the one I didn't post on the last Saturday of my vacation three weeks ago. Better late than never, I hope.

Exactly 100 years ago this month, historian Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) declared the second week of February "Negro History Week," expanding on earlier observations of Frederick Douglass's birthday. I didn't find that any of America's Black editorial cartoonists were drawing about Black history that week or that month, although each of their newspapers took note of the proposal from Woodson and the ASNLH.

Here's what America's Black editorial cartoonists were drawing about in February of 1926.

Given the Heritage Foundation/Project 2025 mission of pressing the Courts to invalidate same-sex marriages like mine (and a law just passed in Tennessee legislating a right to discriminate against us), I was particularly interested to find that the state of Virginia was in the process of outlawing mixed-race marriage exactly 100 years ago this week.

"The Mongrel Bays at the Moon" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Feb. 27, 1926

Leslie Rogers's cartoon was accompanied by a sarcastic "fable" summarizing the history of the "small shipload of outcasts" from England who settled in Jamestown, only to decide twelve years later "that work was obnoxious to them," so they contracted with the Dutch to supply them with slaves from Africa. From that editorial:

"Now, seeing that there were among the slaves many comely maidens, the lusts of these outcasts were aroused, and since the slave-women could not protect themselves, their masters threw themselves upon them and bred children by them. And it came to pass that a great war freed these slaves and made them citizens of a great state and country. But interbreeding went on merrily until the land was filled with a mixed race whose people spoke out against their former masters and kinsmen.

"'We will have no more illegitimate babies,' they cried. 'If you would cohabit with us. you must marry us.'

"And the masters raised their hands and eyes to holy heaven in horror. 'How can we, the salt of the earth, marry with these people who were once our slaves? Heaven forbid! Let us hasten and pass a law to prevent intermarriage in that we may breed with their women without fear of punishment. It is our God-given right. Our law will dull their will and keep them from thinking that they, as human beings, are entitled to live, love and marry according to their desires. We will hasten this law and shroud it in a pretense that we seek to preserve the integrity of all races.'

"And so they did."

Appropriately enough, it was a case out of Virginia that eventually overturned anti-miscegenation laws. Not that the ruling in Loving v. Virginia is certain to stand against the present Project 2025-26 backlash against civil liberties.

By the way, I would have liked to include any cartoons by Black editorial cartoonists from Virginia here, but none of the Black newspapers in that state appear to have employed their own cartoonists at the time. (The Norfolk Journal and Guide did start running its own editorial cartoons later that year.)

"And It Never Says a Mumblin' Word" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Feb. 6, 1926

Leslie Rogers employed what had become a common metaphor for President Coolidge, in this case accusing him of having little to say about the lynching of Black Americans by "mob rule in enlightened society." 

"Silent Cal" did not have a lot to say about a great many things; but he did support the Dyer anti-lynching bill (which never passed Congress) and spoke against the so-called "Americanism" of the Ku Klux Klan. In October of 1925, he told a convention of the American Legion:

"Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of to-day is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat."

"Taking a Black Prisoner from the Jail to the Courthouse" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Feb. 13, 1926

Meanwhile, Kentucky Governor W.J. Fields sent 1,000 troops to secure the safety of a Black defendant in a triple murder case as he was transported from jail to courthouse in Lexington, Kentucky.

The defendant, Ed Harris, stood accused of killing a White man and his two children, and assaulting the man's wife — exactly the sort of case that often excited mobs to take matters into their own hands; so Gov. Fields sent in eight infantry companies, four cavalry troops, two machine gun squadrons, and a tank company, with orders to shoot to kill.

Leslie Rogers here added dirigibles and the "U.S.S. Mobqueller," in a cartoon that reminds me very much of the style of Chicago Tribune editorial cartoonist John T. McCutcheon.

"New Use for U.S. Air Fleet" by Fred B. Watson in Afro-American, Baltimore, Feb. 27, 1926

Fred Watson proposed enlisting the U.S.'s new air fleet to ferry Black prisoners past the volatile mob.

"Trial by Troops" by Wilbert Holloway in Pittsburgh Courier, Feb. 20, 1926

If Wilbert Holloway was not impressed, it was because there was no chance of Ed Harris being found anything but guilty. He pled guilty and was sentenced to hang, his trial lasting all of sixteen minutes.

Elsewhere, Delaware Governor Robert Robinson called out the National Guard to prevent angry mobs from interfering in the trial in Georgetown of 21-year-old Harry Butler, who pled guilty to critically assaulting a 12-year-old white girl. He, too, was sentenced to death by hanging.

As for Tennessee, Holloway may have been referring to the trial of John Franklin Webb, convicted of raping a 17-year-old white girl. The trial and jury deliberation took a combined thirteen minutes; he was sentenced to death in the electric chair.

"Finally Hooked" by Wilbert Holloway in Pittsburgh Courier, Feb. 6, 1926

Holloway didn't limit himself to explicitly Black issues (two of his four February cartoons were about the weather). I can't be sure what his opinion of U.S. involvement in the World Court was; reported elsewhere on the pages of that edition of the Pittsburgh Courier, a southern Senator made his opinion crystal clear.

"The Drunken Driver" by Fred B. Watson in Afro-American, Baltimore, Feb. 6, 1926

On the floor of the U.S. Senate, Sen. Cole Bleas (D-SC) offered as an argument against U.S. participation in the World Court that Liberia and Haiti were members of the League of Nations and would therefore have a say in the selection of World Court judges. If you were triggered by that Tourette's advocate blurting out an obscenity at the BAFTAs on Sunday, you might want to skip the next two paragraphs.

"I call the attention of Senators from the South," Bleas fulminated, "while they are voting on this reservation, to the fact that they are voting for a court where we are to sit side by side with a full-blooded [the N-word], who has as much right as we have in the election of judges of this court. I ask them if they are aware of the fact that there may be and probably will be a  representative of Haiti as a judge on this court so that the southern Senators are voting to throw the destinies of southern women and southern men into the lap of a black man?" 

Bleas used that N-word several more times in the course of his argument, mostly to describe what kind of republics Haiti and Liberia are.

"State's Rights or State's Wrongs" by Fred B. Watson in Afro-American, Baltimore, Feb. 20, 1926

Here's a rare cartoon that includes criticism of California's treatment of Japanese Americans. The topic occasionally came up in the context of protests from the Japanese government, but most white cartoonists and their newspapers approved of cutting off immigration from the Orient, and were content to overlook the restrictions against Japanese-Americans owning property.

Maryland Governor Albert Ritchie's moves to undermine Prohibition would be a topic for another day, but serves as a segue to a couple of editorial cartoons about local issues.

"An Unwelcome Serenader" by Fred B. Watson in Afro-American, Baltimore, Feb. 13, 1926

Watson cites a song popularized by the California Ramblers to express the plight of Black school teachers in his native Baltimore. The story about which he appears to be editorializing concerned two female Black high school teachers, Mabel Jackson and Mary Craft Cottrell, who filed lawsuits against the Baltimore school board for hiring two White women for positions for which Jackson and Cottrell were more qualified.

Jackson and Cottrell had passed the state examination for teachers of domestic art in 1924, placing first and second on the eligibility list. But the Baltimore School Board instead hired Susie Jennings and Elizabeth Burrell, neither of whom had a college degree or a graduation certificate from an accredited normal school, nor had they passed a competitive examination for teaching domestic arts.

The School Board contended that tailoring and dressmaking were trade vocational subjects not requiring a teaching degree. Jennings and Burrell, in their view, were not high school teachers per se, in spite of instructing high school students in a high school building during high school hours.

"An Alarm He Doesn't Heed" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Feb. 20, 1926

In Chicago, Blacks could apply for and qualify for employment as city firefighters, but would have to wait for a vacancy at the Taylor Street station, the one and only fire station open to Blacks. Any vacancies at any other fire station in town could only be filled by White applicants.

Even if their only qualifications involved tailoring and dressmaking.

Okay, that's an exaggeration. But you get the general idea of where race relations were in this country 100 years ago.

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Well, this is a little off-topic, but since Fred Watson brought up Prohibition a couple cartoons ago, I'll close with one of Leslie Rogers's other regular features in Chicago Defender, a more or less non-topical panel titled "The Hardest Job in the World." 

"The Hardest Job in the World" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Feb. 20, 1926

Anyone who has had to live with dietary restrictions should understand.

Q Toon: Just Deserted

The Supreme Court declined to hear Kim Davis's appeal of a $100,000 judgment against her in suit brought against her by David Moore and David Ermold because she refused to issue them a marriage license.

Davis was elected Rowan County Clerk as a Democrat in 2014, a position whose job description includes the issuing of marriage licenses. When the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision made marriage equality the law of the land in 2015, the Davids applied for a marriage license; but she refused "under God's authority" and told them to go to some other county. She then went further and stopped issuing marriage licenses to all applicants to protest the prospect of having to issue them to same-sex couples.

Two different lawsuits followed: one by Moore and Ermold, who contended that she had violated their constitutional right to marry; and one challenging her refusal to issue any marriage licenses. In the latter case, U.S. District Judge David Bunning ordered Davis to issue licenses to both gay and straight couples. That prompted Moore and Ermold to try once again to obtain a license, but Davis and her deputies rejected that request, as well. Kentucky eventually enacted a law that would accommodate county clerks like Davis by removing their names and signatures from the forms used for marriage licenses. 

Moore and Ermold’s case against Davis went to trial, and a jury awarded each of them $50,000. Davis then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, which upheld that award. It rejected Davis’ argument that requiring her to issue a marriage license to Moore and Ermold would have violated her First Amendment right to freely exercise her religion. In that court’s view, because Davis was acting on behalf of the government when she refused to issue the license, her actions were not protected by the First Amendment. 

In the meantime, Davis switched her party affiliation to Republican as the Grand Old Party rallied around her as a cause celebre. Republican Presidential candidates fought over who got to champion her case loudest (see this cartoon). Rowan County voters, however, threw her out of office in the next election.

Marriage equality advocates were quite worried that the current Supreme Court would seize on Davis's case as a vehicle to overturn Obergefell. The right-wing supermajority on the Court today includes three of the justices who ruled in the minority, two of whom, Thomas and Alito, have been very vocal in their continued opposition to the decision. They have been joined by Trump appointees who have demonstrated that their lip service to the concept of stare decisis ain't worth a 2015 penny.

This Supreme Court has already decreed that wedding cake bakers, florists, and pharmacists are free to discriminate against whomever they dislike, provided they claim that God made them do it. And along comes Davis asking to extend the privilege to public servants.

So virtually everyone was surprised when the Court refused to hear her appeal. One has to assume that the current majority thought that Davis's case made for lousy law.

They're probably waiting for another case better suited to putting an end to same-sex marriage, even when the County Clerk is pleased to assist the happy couple.

August Assembly Required

Back when I was drawing cartoons for University of Wisconsin student newspapers, there would be one cartoon I drew every August in order to make the deadline of the first edition of the new fall semester.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Sept. 5, 1985

As it happens, the UW-Parkside Ranger did publish Volume 14, Issue 1 on August 29, 1985; but this cartoon I drew that August only made it into Volume 14, Issue 2. I don't remember whether I hadn't known there would be an August 29 issue, or whether there wasn't space for this cartoon. It was probably the former, though.

Anyway, there was a white minority government ruling South Africa in those days. Apartheid meant a strict segregation of the races; native Blacks were kept subjugated in impoverished villages, forbidden the vote, and generally treated like trespassers in their own land. In response, corporations and universities were responding to demands to divest from South African companies.

Amid violent suppression of Black South African protests against a new constitution, President Ronald Reagan resisted congressional and citizen calls to impose sanctions on the South African government. Even with a Republican majority in the Senate, Congress would pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 over Reagan's veto, banning new U.S. investment in South Africa and sales to the country's police and military, while cutting off South African imports.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Sept. 5, 1995

The UWM Post published three issues during the summer semester in those days; I would contribute cartoons to the summer editions in 1996.

As for this cartoon, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX) was a prominent fiscal conservative, and the lead namesake of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act on 1985. The bill promised to balance the federal budget by 1990 by mandating across-the-board cuts in government programs if Congress failed to pass budgets beneath a prescribed deficit level.

It didn't work. The federal deficit would be eliminated, temporarily, under President Bill Clinton, but thanks to tax increases that were anathema to Gramm and the rest of his party — which were reversed as soon as the supposed deficit hawks were back in total charge of things.

The line in the third panel of my cartoon is a direct quote of his rationale for simultaneously cutting benefits for the poor and taxes for the rich — still Republican dogma to this day. They got their way in spades with the Big Abomnibus Budget Bill of 2025, which proved that Republicans never really cared about running up the deficit in the first place — in case anybody thought that George W. Bush's deficits were a fluke.

Gramm was running for president in the summer of 1995, and made a good showing in an Iowa straw poll in August; but his campaign didn't make it past the Iowa caucuses in January. The one positive thing I can say about him is that he was a hoot to draw.

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I've got one other cartoon from August, 1995 that I'd like to include here, because it never got published. I'll leave it up to you to decide why that was.

It's about a local news item, and drawn for the Racine Journal Times. The Ku Klux Klan announced plans to hold a rally on August 19 in front of the courthouse in Elkhorn, population then around 5,000, in Walworth County. In response, the county's Republican and Democratic parties issued a joint statement denouncing the Klan while affirming their First Amendment right "to have and declare" their beliefs. 

"We do not support the belief that hatred solves problems," their joint letter read. "We believe hate crimes and hate group activities negatively affect everyone in the community."

When the Walworth County board took up a resolution in support of "peaceful counteractions against hate groups," someone objected to the term "hate groups." So the board amended the resolution so that it lent its support to "peaceful counteractions against unhappy groups."

Unpublished, August, 1995

Lake Geneva Supervisor Dan Janowak explained to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Meg Jones that he suggested the alternative phrasing because the KKK "is not a hate program. It's more or less people that are unhappy with what's going on and they don't necessarily hate."

Board Chairman Lawrence Scharine weaseled, "'Hate' or 'unhappy,' it doesn't make much of a difference. The point is still there."

"Lied" or "weaseled," it doesn't make much of a difference. The point is still there.

The Klan rally took place as planned, separated from counter-protesters by "a small army of police in riot gear." The Journal Times didn't offer an estimate of the number of Klansmen involved (and Imperial spokesWizard David Neumann wouldn't say how many members the local Klan had), but implied that they were outnumbered by the 400-500 counter-protesters and curious on-lookers. "Klansmen spoke against affirmative action and hiring quotas," the JT''s Joseph Scolaro reported. "They continually called protesters 'scum' and decried homosexuals and minorities."

The only arrests made at the rally were of two anti-Klan protesters from Milwaukee, released on signature bonds.

Speaking of affirmative action...

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, August 5, 2005

As difficult as it may be to remember only twenty short years ago, a little corporate diversity was thought to be a good thing. I drew this cartoon to accompany a Business Journal editorial in favor of favoring "disadvantaged" businesses.

The idea was that businesses owned by racial minorities, women, and/or physically challenged persons should be given favorable consideration in bidding for government contracts; in practice, just having one or two such persons serving on the corporate board would qualify a company as labeled disadvantaged.

Under the present regime, of course, these companies would have to fire any racial minorities, women, and physically challenged persons on their corporate board just to have a glimmer of hope to compete with and out-bribe all-white, all-male, all-cis family and golfing partners of La Cosa di Trump.

for Q Syndicate, August, 2015

And finally today, marriage equality vs. religious liberty.

Q Toon: That Old-Time Religion

Southern Baptists held their annual national conference in Dallas earlier this month, passing resolutions thoroughly in keeping with the denomination’s commitment to being in the forefront of the retreat from charity and good will.

Authoritarian Republicans have been working hard to demonize transgender persons in popular discourse, but marriage equality is a settled issue for most Americans. That didn't deter the Southern Baptists from passing a four-page resolution "call[ing] for the overturning of laws and court rulings, including Obergefell v. Hodges, that defy God’s design for marriage and family."

Further provisions in the resolution deny the existence of transgender persons, demand "complete and permanent" defunding of Planned Parenthood, and decry what its authors call "willful childlessness."

Southern Baptists, the largest protestant sect in the U.S., have a history of opposition to racial and gender equality, workers' collective rights, welfare, and science, while mounting biblical advocacy of segregation and slavery. 

About the only social reform movement that they have supported was Prohibition. The record is clear on how that worked out.

June Toons, Goons, and Honeymoons

Today's Graphical History Tour whisks us through four decades worth of my editorial cartoons in Junes.

Bergetoons.com Exclusive! June, 1985

Since I was drawing exclusively for the UW-Parkside Ranger in 1985, and they didn't publish during the summer, it appears that this is the the one and only cartoon I committed to bristol board in the first month of their summer vacation.

I had taken a second-shift job to pay the bills, but it didn't pay enough for me to afford a vacation myself. For that matter, it wasn't great at paying the bills, either.

At any rate, for the benefit of any editor and publisher types who have difficulty understanding editorial cartoons, I was commenting on the impotence of the U.S. nuclear arsenal when faced with a terrorist action — in this case, the hijacking of TWA flight 847.

On June 14, Shi'ite terrorists hijacked the Cairo-to-San Diego flight during its Athens-to-Rome leg, forcing it to land in Beirut. They held passengers and crew hostage for 17 days, while forcing the plane to fly back and forth from there to Algiers. The hijackers separated hostages with Jewish-sounding names and sent them to a Shia-controlled prison in Beirut. They also executed U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem, throwing his body onto the tarmac and shooting his corpse some more.

The ordeal was immensely frustrating for the Ronald Reagan administration, which had come to office largely thanks to portraying Jimmy Carter's response to the Iran hostage crisis as ineffective. The crisis ended only after Israel agreed to release some Lebanese prisoners.

One of the hijackers, Mohammed ali Hammadi, was arrested in West Germany two years later, tried, and sentenced to life in prison, but released on parole in 2005. He was fatally shot outside his home in the Beqaa Valley by unknown gunmen this past January. The remaining hijackers have been at large for the past four decades.

✍

Jumping ahead to June of 1995, I feel like the local newscaster tasked with segueing from a tragic news story of death and destruction to a feel-good feature item about cute puppies delighting residents of an assisted living home. 

But it is Pride Month, after all.

"Consider the Source" in Lavender Lifestyles, Minneapolis, June 27, 1995

My very dear friend from college days, Jeff, asked me to draw this illustration in June of 1995. His friend Julie Daffyd wrote a regular gossip/dish/advice/humor column, "Consider the Source," in one of the Twin Cities' LGBTQ+ publications; if I recall correctly, she wanted a caricature of herself on the publication's Pride float surrounded by a bevy of pulchritudinous hunks.

Commissioning for a caricature of yourself is a risky move, especially for publication. She must not have been terribly upset at how I drew her, however, as she had Jeff ask me for one more later on. But only once more.

✍

Setting the WABAC machine for June of  2005:

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, June 17, 2005

Here's one I have always been pleased with, mostly on account of how the light and shade worked out.

The Northridge Mall was a failed shopping center on Milwaukee's far north side; and what is astonishing here is that, in spite of becoming a target for graffiti, drug use, and arson, it has taken twenty more years after I drew this cartoon to get Northridge Mall torn down. It closed for good in 2003; a home goods store and a grocery store opened on the property for a while, but proposals to revitalize the mall itself went nowhere.

The mall was bought in 2014 by an investment company in China, U.S. Black Spruce Enterprise Group, which then spent years fighting the City of Milwaukee's efforts to condemn the building (and has refused to pay for Milwaukee Fire Department responses to arson fires there). In 2023, Governor Tony Evers authorized a $15 million grant to the city for Northridge's demolition, which is scheduled to be completed by the end of this year.

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Last but not least, our Tour makes one of  our most popular stops, June of 2015.

for Q Syndicate and on Fusion.net, June/July, 2015

On June 26, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of marriage equality in the landmark case Obergefell v. Hodges. Each of the four dissenting justices, pictured in my cartoon, published his own dissenting opinion, a rather unusual move. While it is not uncommon for a justice to issue a concurring or a separate dissenting opinion, seldom have we ever seen four dissenting opinions on the same case.

Justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito basically agreed in their contention that the Court majority was overstepping jurisprudence because the U.S. Constitution does not specifically mention a right to marry one's sweetheart. Scalia, citing the precedent of Jiggery v. Pokery, and Alito protested that defining marriage is the purview of state legislatures, not the federal government. Thomas wrote that marriage equality for same-sex couples violated homophobes' First Amendment right of religious freedom.

This serves as a reminder that there is a right-wing Republican supermajority on the Court now, and this is the month to expect a flurry of rulings on everything from health care for transgender youth, to religious liberties, to voting rights, to gun control, to environmental protection. The three Justices elevated by the Blatantly Corrupt Trump Maladministration since I drew this cartoon have moved the Court so far to the right that Amy Comey Barrett passes for the Court's "swing vote."

Under cover of the daily Trumpster fire these days, who knows what draconian, puritan mischief the current Supreme Court will be able to get away with?

Quel Hommage

Today's Graphical History Tour dives into the archives in my basement and comes up with a quartet of cartoons from Januaries from decades ago.

I mentioned earlier this week that some of my fellow editorial cartoonists mimicked Ann Telnaes's drawing style in their #StandWithAnn cartoons, while I and others had not. I've drawn a number of cartoons over the years in the style of other artists, particularly when appropriating their ideas. Other times, I have simplified the drawing, as in this one:

in UW-P Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Jan. 31, 1985

I was referencing a nearly 75-year-old cartoon drawn by Puck cartoonist Johannes Keppler when then-President William Howard Taft was having similar problems getting his legislative agenda through Congress and the courts.

"I Must Have Been Dozing" by Johannes Keppler in Puck, June 22, 1910

I didn't include anywhere near as much shading, the window, the doorway, or anything outside the room, but I kept the Capitol sewing basket, the table it rested on, and two of the cats.

Now, there was a problem with my cartoon in that hardly any of the Ranger's readers would have had any reason to be familiar with the original Keppler version. Not even the professors would have had a subscription to Puck magazine in 1910; only someone else with The American Presidency in Political Cartoons 1776-1976 (Peregrine Smith Inc., 1976) could possibly have caught the reference.

The message of the cartoon still applied, and should have been understood by anyone paying any attention to current events; but as a tribute, the cartoon was, frankly, just stealing an old idea.

Reusing someone else's old cartoon works best if the original cartoon is (or ought to be) well known: Thomas Nast's "Who Stole the People's Money," or Charles Schulz's cartoons of Lucy yanking the football away from Charlie Brown. I am reminded, however, of a recent cartoon by a fellow editorial cartoonist that referenced a specific episode of The Simpsons. According to the reader comments, I wasn't the only person who had missed that particular episode and therefore the reference.

Then there was the time that I drew a cartoon for the NorthCountry Journal relying on a reference to "Calvin and Hobbes," a very popular comic strip running in many newspapers at the time. The NCJ editor and publisher, however, had never seen "Calvin and Hobbes," so I had to explain it to her and assure her that her readers would get the cartoon.

By the way, the credit line under my signature in my Ranger cartoon says "again," because I had drawn a cartoon the previous November about Ronald Reagan's reelection, based on a Keppler cartoon celebrating Teddy Roosevelt's 1905 inauguration. I don't suppose many Parkside students or faculty were familiar with that cartoon, either.

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in UWM Post, Milwaukee, Jan. 30, 1995

I include this cartoon in part to set up a subsequent homage cartoon. Dick Armey (R-TX) was the new House Majority Leader in the 104th Congress, and one of the architects of the 1994 Republican Revolution.

During a January 20, 1995 radio interview, Armey referred to fellow Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA), the only out gay man in Congress, as "Barney Fag." The quote, verbatim, as Armey was discussing a possible book deal, was: “I like peace and quiet and I don’t need to listen to Barney Fag, [pause] Barney Frank, haranguing in my ear because I made a few bucks off a book.” 

The slur was reported by several radio networks, and Armey blamed the media for reporting on what he claimed was an audio glitch, not a slip of the tongue or intentional insult.

Rep. Frank refused to accept Armey's excuses, saying, “There are a lot of possible ways to mispronounce my name but that one, I think, is the least common, ... I turned to my own expert, my mother, who reports that in 59 years of marriage, no one ever introduced her as Elsie Fag.”

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in Business Journal, Milwaukee, Jan. 21, 2005

A propos the Washington Post editor's excuse for spiking an Ann Telnaes cartoon on the grounds that it reiterated past and future opinion columns, here's one of the many cartoons I drew for the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee reiterating the editorial it ran alongside.

That was, in fact, the role I was expected to fill at the Business Journal from 1996 to 2005. I was brought in to replace conservative cartoonist Craig DuMez, who had often drawn whatever was on his mind. The editors at the Business Journal were interested in having editorial cartoons that reflected the week's editorial — which weren't always as far to the right as DuMez was.

Or, in this case, political at all.

I've never met the guy, but DuMez might have chafed at having to draw as many cartoons about hospital expansions, mergers, and construction as I had to do in my nine years with the Business Journal. This editorial had something to do with an addition to Froedtert Hospital, which the Beej hoped wouldn't be tarted up with a bunch of fancy frills — the sort of things one assumes architects dream about and hospital planners hope will make patients feel they're in a five-star hotel.

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for Q Syndicate, Jan., 2015

Finally, 2015 was going to be the year that the Supreme Court discovered that criminalizing same-sex marriage discriminated against same-sex couples, so Republican legislatures around the country were desperately preparing mechanisms to keep unconstitutional discrimination legal.

This is one of my cartoons in which the characters are not based on real people, even if their actions or opinions are based on those of actual persons. My clue to the reader that I've made up the person in the cartoon is if their name is somehow a pun.

You might find Lauryl's name in the list of ingredients on your shampoo bottle. Senator Beautron can be found overlooking a sports arena and displaying scores, stats, and replays.

I was considering last names for my latest recurring characters, MAGA Max and Liberal Leo, whom I named purely for the alliteration. "Headroom" has already been taken, so perhaps Max's surname should be K. Passidy. Or something less obvious, like Carpone. How about O'Delay, Leo?

I'll have to get back to you on that.

Coping With Loss

I've made as a regular feature of these Graphical History Tours digging up cartoons that I had drawn 40, 30, 20, and 10 years earlier, give or take a week or two. That will be the theme for today, and the good news is that means there will be no cartoons about the lying sack of shite about to infest the Oval Office next January.

The bad news is that starting in 1984, elections in years ending in a four somehow seem to have all favored Republicans, and that is what each of these cartoons will be about.

in UW-P Ranger, Somers Wis., Nov. 29, 1984

That's a completely unrecognizable Newt Gingrich (R-GA) in the center of this cartoon from November of 1984. Gingrich's suburban Atlanta district had just reelected him to a fourth term in Congress, where he was founder of the "Conservative Opportunity Society." Ronald Reagan embraced the ideas of these previously obscure House members in his reelection campaign. 

It was easier to find pictures of former football star Jack Kemp (R-NY) and thus easier to come up with a good caricature. I'm not sure whether the third shoe salesman was intended to be any specific congressman.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, Nov. 10, 1994

Ten years later, Gingrich’s hair had gone completely white, and I was having plenty of practice honing my caricature of the chief architect of Republicans’ “Contract With America.” The GOP had successfully campaigned on its promise to cut taxes now and to pass a constitutional amendment requiring balanced budgets in the future— the failure of Supply Side economics to date notwithstanding.

Q Syndicate, Nov. 2004

George Dubya Bush's reelection campaign in 2004 rested heavily on post-9/11 jingoism, but also on Republican Party promises to fight back against the homosexual menace. 

If any significant fraction of the liberals, LGBTQ+s, and feminists who have vowed to move to Canada because of an incoming Republican administration had ever carried through with it, Justin Trudeau would be cruising to another term in office with a solid parliamentary majority to back him up.

Instead, we have for the most part stayed here on our side of the line, fought for our right to marry, and left Mr. Trudeau desperately trying to salvage his rickety coalition government in a gale force blizzard.

Q Syndicate, Nov., 2014

Equal marriage rights were still tantalizingly beyond the reach for many of us in November of 2014. In Michigan, where Q Syndicate is based, adoptive parents April DeBoer and Jayne Rouse had sued as a couple for the right to adopt each other's children. The Sixth Circuit Court overturned lower court rulings that had favored DeBoer and Rouse, ruling instead that marriage was reserved for couples who might bear children unintentionally.

The ruling was a setback for same-sex couples with children in Michigan and other states covered by the Sixth Circuit (Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee).

The U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage the following year in Obergefell v. Hodges. 

For now. The Court now doesn’t think highly of marriage equality. Or Obergefell. Or stare decisis.