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: Parental Rights and Wrongs

The Supreme Court wrapped up its work for the litigation season at the end of June, its 6-to-3 right-wing supermajority handing down a thoroughly predictable series of rulings in support of Trumpster goodthink.

Of interest and disappointment to the LGBTQ+ community, the Court ruled in Mahmoud v. Taylor in favor of a group of parents who demanded to exempt their children from exposure to LGBTQ+ history and literature. The Muslim, Ukrainian Orthodox, and Catholic litigants had sued the Montgomery County, Maryland, school board to provide alternative curricula for their children. 

The dispute stems from the county school board’s 2022 approval of books featuring LGBTQ+ characters for use in its language-arts curriculum. One book, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, tells the story of a little girl’s reaction to her uncle’s same-sex wedding; another book, Pride Puppy, describes a puppy that becomes lost during a Pride parade. 

The county initially allowed parents to excuse their children from instruction using the LGBTQ-themed storybooks. When the county removed that option in 2023, several parents went to federal court.

Writing for the majority, Dubya-appointed Justice Samuel Alito “what the parents seek here is not the right to micromanage the public school curriculum, but rather to have their children opt out of a particular educational requirement that burdens their well-established right ‘to direct ‘the religious upbringing’ of their children.’”

Clinton nominee Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, countered that the Court's grant of a parental right to veto LGBTQ+-positive public school curriculum materials on religious grounds could mean that “books on evolution and interfaith marriage, and history may be next.”

It's easy to imagine that today's Court majority would have no problem with that.

Meanwhile, the Supremes declined to rule whether parental rights exist outside of their religious rights. In U.S. v. Skrmetti, the Court ruled Tennessee's SB1 (the number indicating it was the state senate's most urgent business this session) banning medical care for transgender minors, even against the wishes of patient, parents, and medical professionals.

No, parents: you and your transgender child have no say in the child's health care. That is up to the State. No opt-out for you.

The plaintiffs had tried to argue that Skrmetti was about gender discrimination: e.g., a minor the state identifies as male could be prescribed hormone blockers, but a minor the state identifies as female cannot. Chief Justice John Roberts rejected that argument, because the second patient is being discriminated against for being transgender, not for being female, and that's okay.

Influence of Skrmetti has already begun to spread to other transgender concerns. The Seventh Circuit vacated its prior rulin g against anti-trans bathroom policies in public schools. The Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits have been instructed to review two decisions involving Medicaid exclusions for gender-affirming medical care, one involving public teachers health insurance plans, and one involving birth certificate policies.

If nobody can come up with a religious liberty argument in favor of transgender medical care, health insurance coverage, and lavatory use, perhaps, my cartoon character suggests, someone could at least raise a faith-based objection to the State mandating who The Lord Your God is.

But I suspect the theocrats on the Court would find some excuse to find reason to infringe that particular religious exercise.

Sep-Two-Ber

Good heavens! It's almost October and I haven't hauled out a bunch of my old September cartoons yet! 

in UW-Parkside Ranger, September 9, 1982

Ronald Reagan's legacy rests upon his promises to cut taxes, but he raised them, too. In fact, if one measures tax changes as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, his 1982 tax hike was the largest in modern U.S. history — no matter what Republican attack ads have tried to tell you about Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, or will tell you about Joe Biden.

The 1980s tax increases are less well-known, in part because they didn't involve increases in individual income tax rates. The biggest, the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982, increased revenue mainly by tightening up rules on depreciation, leasing, contract accounting and investment tax credits. The Social Security Amendments of 1983 sped up planned increases in payroll tax rates, among other things. The Deficit Reduction Act of 1984 changed rules on interest exclusions, income averaging and such. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987 closed a few loopholes and extended a telephone excise tax. And the Tax Reform Act of 1986, while it lowered the top individual income tax rate to 28 percent from 50 percent, contained enough offsetting changes that, for the first two years after enactment, it raised tax revenue. 

And he still ended up leaving what was, in 1989, by far the biggest federal deficit in history.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, September 28, 1992

Reagan came to office promising to tackle the much tamer deficit left by Jimmy Carter; billionaire H. Ross Perot made the same promises in 1992 about George H.W. Bush's deficit. And, also like Reagan, he was maddeningly evasive about how he was going to accomplish it.

in The Biz (Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee), October, 2002

But enough about fiscal policy. Here's a full-color cartoon I drew for The Biz, a flashy little quarterly insert published in The Business Journal for a few years in the 'aughts. The Biz was printed on a brighter, magazine-quality grade of paper than the standard newsprint of its parent journal. 

My regular editorial cartoons for them illustrated the staff editorial and were black-and-white TIFF files. The Biz was intended to attract and engage younger readers, so the editors wanted color. They would call on me when they had an article that didn't lend itself to color photography.

I didn't have software with CMYK color capability when I was drawing cartoons for The Biz; the RGB .jpeg files I sent them came out a bit more drab in print. Black, the color missing from RGB formatting, came out just fine; but you can notice that the bright magenta in the young employee's shirt became a mild lavender in print, and his neon green mohawk is a tamer shade.

The colors you see here on your screen do not necessarily appear the same in print. Screen colors are produced by light; print colors are produced by ink. Since I started putting out color cartoons in CMYK format in 2012, I've only ever had one opportunity to see how my color cartoons look in print.

for Q Syndicate, September, 2012

This was not that cartoon.

My opportunity would come three years later, when was in Columbus, Ohio, for the annual convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. But like this cartoon, the cartoon I found in Outlook involved persons of color, and it was a relief to see how nicely their skin color appeared in print.

Drawing for LGBTQ+ media, I try from time to time to depict more beefcake than I might if I were still drawing for the Business Journal. (I've suspected that my setting one Business Journal cartoon about exclusively male boardrooms in a sauna is what got that cartoon spiked.) Sure, I could have set this cartoon on the sidelines or in the management guy's office rather than the locker room. Brendan Ayanbadejo rocks a bow tie and three piece suit every bit as well as he does a towel.

But while I'm sure the editors and publishers subscribing to my cartoons are Very Serious Journalists, I also know that this may have gotten some of their readers to pause on the editorial page just a little bit before flipping on to the feature interview of Hollywood's Hunk of the Month.

✍

I'll be in Columbus again next month for another AAEC convention — only the second one of these that I will have attended. Sadly, Outlook ceased publication in 2017, so that 2015 cartoon will remain the only one letting me know whether I cut it as a colorist.

The Plagiarism Thing

Lack of talent and originality will out. Especially if you fancy yourself an editorial cartoonist lampooning local officials in the hometown newspaper.

A sorry hack submitting free editorial cartoons to the Montgomery (Maryland) Sentinel under the signature William Charles was exposed by council member Tom Moore as a serial plagiarist, stealing other cartoonists' work, expunging the signatures and repurposing the cartoons to address local issues. (Alan Gardner of the Daily Cartoonist notes that even the cartoonist's name might turn out to be stolen. Heck, even the signature!)

For example, this cartoon from last July, critical of the aforementioned Councilman Moore...

...was a badly labeled rip-off of this CartoonStock.com cartoon by someone named Kes:

Or, compare the "William Charles" cartoon on the left with the Andy Singer "No Exit" original on the right:

"William Charles" swiped the work of about a dozen different cartoonists, whose styles are so dissimilar, it boggles the mind how the Sentinel editors could possibly have mistaken Charles's so-called work as the product of any one individual. I've looked through a number of the cartoons Councilman Moore collected in a .zip file, and several cartoons clearly involve pasting together pieces of three or four different cartoonists' and clip artists' work.

Councilman Moore reports that "I informed the Sentinel’s editor, Brian Karem, in person several months ago that his newspaper is stealing art from all over the Internet and passing it off as its own; he seemed unconcerned and said he’d maybe mention something to 'William Charles' about it." Since Moore took the case public, Mr. Karem has suddenly taken notice:

“He is a third-party UNPAID contributor. We have about four or five of those. As I said, we’re a small family-owned newspaper. As for not noticing, yep, the buck stops here on this one. He sent us Jpegs and PDFs of his art that showed no tells of being manipulated. If there is a way to tell in the future, I’d appreciate a heads up on that. In fact any assistance you can provide in that area would be GREATLY appreciated. I first found out about it from Mike Shapiro [one of the plagiarized cartoonists] two days ago. We pulled all of the cartoons and I now have a copy editor going through them all to see how many are original.”

"No tells of being manipulated"? Seriously? Mr. Karem couldn't see that the piper and the children in this 'toon were not drawn by the same person? (I'd bet that the four or five nearest kids were drawn by Walt Handelsman.)

Given the discrepancy between Karem's responses a couple months ago and a couple days ago, I have to wonder whether this is just another example of a newspaper happily choosing free content, worth every penny. I've been disappointed in a weekly newspaper here in Wisconsin which breaks up its editorial page with its "Web Picks" -- images copied from whatever is trending on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

At least they don't make any pretensions that they are running original work. And the local TV news does the same thing when they present viral videos as news, so I guess that's where bottom line journalism has sunk.

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.

Da Q Toon: Illinois Equality

We had a little difficulty getting this week's cartoon out this week -- I sent it to the syndicate at the usual time on Monday morning, but apparently the Chinese or the Iranians or North Koreans hacked into the internet and turned my cartoon into a plea to send C!ali$ to the crown prince of Kenya or something. My editors left alarmed messages on our answering machine Tuesday afternoon, followed by urgent emails. Eventually, I got these messages and quickly sent the cartoon out again, hoping against hope that I was not too late. At any rate, as the deadline ticked down to 00:00:00, my original emails turned up deep in the recesses of the spam folder of their firewall program's File Not Found repository.

All this for a cartoon that presumes a news event that isn't scheduled to happen until Thursday, and then only if all goes well.

That's when the Illinois House of Representatives has been scheduled to vote on a marriage equality bill that has already been passed in the state Senate and which Governor Pat Quinn has promised to sign. Advocates have been optimistic about its passage, but we've already seen -- in Maryland in 2010 -- that you can't always count on state representatives to vote the way they led you to believe they would. As of Tuesday, the bill's sponsors were still counting supporters and considering postponing a vote another week or so.

I could find myself in the company of the Chicago Tribune's famous "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline, but here's my cartoon anyway:

And, in case you're wondering, I certainly did have the "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline in mind as I drew the cartoon.

Q Toon: A Totally Gay Election

2012 will go down in history as the first year that voters approved marriage equality.

Different-sex marriage remains the law in Minnesota; but voters in Washington and Maryland approved prior action of their legislatures in favor of marriage equality, and voters in Maine overturned a previous referendum restricting marriage to straight couples. (And voters in Iowa rebuffed an effort to unseat a fourth justice of their Supreme Court who had ruled in favor of marriage equality in 2009.)

The six congressional candidates alluded to in this cartoon are incumbents Jared Polis (D-CO), David Cicilline (D-RI), and newly elected candidates Mark Pocan (D-WI), Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), Mark Takano (D-WA), and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). The lone gay candidate to lose last Tuesday was Republican Richard Tisei, who narrowly lost to incumbent John Tierney (D-MA).

I went somewhat out on a limb by including Sinema in that list when I drew the cartoon on Sunday night. That race wasn't called in her favor until Tuesday. She will be the first openly bisexual member of Congress, and possibly its second out atheist.

And I'm particularly proud that my home state elected Tammy Baldwin to the U.S. Senate. I'll admit that I occasionally had some doubts that Wisconsin would elect as Senator one of the most liberal members of the House (and I was not alone here) after making such a sharp turn to the right in 2010 and 2011. But, the unrelieved nastiness from all advertising comers in the fall notwithstanding, she did a great job of introducing herself to the voters while Tommy Thompson and his Republican rivals were busy attacking each other in the spring and summer.

÷ ÷ ÷

Regarding Saturday's blog entry about in the Strand Magazine, I've been trying to find the next article in Arthur Lord's series on American editorial cartoonists in 1902, so far without success. In fact, I have been unable to find Mr. Lord's article in Google's on-line digitization of the October, 1902 edition of Strand Magazine in which it is supposed to have appeared.

What Mr. Gus Frederick says on his Homer Davenport site is: "Through Ebay, I recently obtained a selection of nine original pages from the October, 1902 number of The Strand Magazine from London. This was an article entitled The American Cartoonist and His Work by Arthur Lord and featured short bios and examples of four 'famous' cartoonists of the day."

Mr. Frederick posted an Optical Character Recognition rendition of the text and illustrations rather than images of those nine pages, so we can't confirm that they have "The Strand Magazine" in the top margin of alternate pages, as the magazine would have had. I have so far found no reference to anyone in the U.S. or Canada having started up a "Strand Magazine" stateside, or that there was a separate North American edition of the London publication. (Perhaps in London, Ontario?)

One reason I suspect that the publication is American is the lack of any British condescension toward the New World cartoonists or the U.S. press. When Ohio Senator Mark Hanna is first mentioned in the article, it is by his last name alone, indicating that the author expected all of his readers to know who "Hanna" was. It's a reasonable assumption that American readers would recognize "Hanna" as the Karl Rove of William McKinley's presidency, but would British readers?

Mr. Frederick notes the British spellings -- "draughtsman," rather than "draftsman"; "abhour" instead of "abhor" -- and florid language of the article, but that doesn't guarantee that the pages were published in London. "American" spelling was not universally accepted in in this country in 1902. American spelling dates back at least as far as Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary, but there were resistance and ridicule when Teddy Roosevelt proposed making "simplified spelling" official in 1906.

My first thought was that the pages might be from another publication. I thought of Public Opinion, which was fond of printing editorial cartoons; but it was published weekly, not monthly, and doesn't appear to have attached bylines to its feature articles. It seems unlikely that Puck would have profiled a cartoonist from the competing Harper's Weekly while ignoring its own remarkable cartoonists. Harper's Weekly, of course, was published weekly; and, like any other magazine of its day, put its own name on the top of every page.

I'll keep looking.

Q Toon: Marriage Equality on Balance

With election day 13 days away, it's time for this cartoonist to stop frittering his time away on cartoons about National Coming Out Day, evangelicals slumming in the gayborhood, and TV sitcoms.

The 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals ruled last week that the federal "Defense of Marriage Act" (DOMA) is unconstitutional.

[Judge Dennis Jacobs] said the law was written so broadly that it touches more than a thousand federal laws. "Homosexuals are not in a position to adequately protect themselves from the discriminatory wishes of the majoritarian public," Jacobs wrote.
He rejected arguments by supporters of the law that it was intended to limit new categories of eligibility for federal funds, promote uniform administration of federal law, protect traditional marriage and encourage responsible procreation.
"Even if preserving tradition were in itself an important goal, DOMA is not a means to achieve it," he said.

That DOMA was headed for the Supreme Court was a virtual certainty, so the question is how the ruling will affect ballot initiatives in Minnesota, Maryland, Maine and Washington state on November 6. The legislatures of Maine, Maryland and Washington have voted for, and their governors have signed into law, marriage equality. Opposite-sex marriage exclusivity, on the other hand, is the law in Minnesota, where the Catholic Church is dropping everything else to enshrine it in the state constitution.

The Washington, opponents of marriage equality succeeded in putting Measure 74 on the ballot, possibly confusing voters because passage would actually affirm what the legislature and governor have already done.


In Maine, this marks the first time that gay-rights supporters -- rather than opponents -- have chosen to put same-sex marriage before voters. A gay-marriage law passed by the legislature in 2009 was overturned in a referendum that fall. Marriage equality supporters in the state decided to put a measure in support of marriage equality on the ballot this year, when the presidential election would draw out more voters.

The polls have the Minnesota amendment on the razor's edge, while there is reason to be cautiously optimistic about one of the other three states becoming the first in the nation to support marriage equality by popular referendum.

In Maryland, as in Maine and Washington, the most recent polls show a lead for the supporters of same-sex marriage. But comparable leads in other states -- notably in California in 2008 -- evaporated by Election Day, and Josh Levin, manager of the Marylanders for Marriage Equality campaign, expects the final result to be extremely close.

With races this close, anything, from a judge's ruling exciting one side, to the Obama and Romney campaigns' decision to focus their efforts elsewhere, could have an effect on the outcome.

Q Toon: This He Said, And Nothing More

As Marylanders have been preparing to vote on a referendum to overturn their state's marriage equality law, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendan Ayanbadejo spoke out strongly against the measure back in March.

"Gay and lesbian couples want to marry for similar reasons as we all do: love and commitment. It’s time to allow them the opportunity to build a family through marriage. It’s a matter of fairness. This is why I’m asking Marylanders to join me in supporting marriage equality for same-sex couples.
“Having the freedom to marry means committed couples and their children will have the same crucial protections under the law as other families. Churches can always have their beliefs, but government is supposed to treat everybody the same, and that’s equal. America is supposed to be the land of the free but in order for this to be true for all of us, then we must have the ability to marry whom we love regardless of their gender."

More recently, Ayanbadejo offered two tickets to the Ravens' first home game of the season this past Monday as part of a Marylanders for Marriage Equality fund raiser. Delegate to the Maryland legislature Rev. Emmett C. Burns, Jr. (D-Baltimore County), who is also founder and pastor of Rising Sun First Baptist Church, wrote a letter to Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti expressing his outrage:

"I am requesting that you take the necessary actions as a National Football League Franchise Owner to inhibit such expressions from your employee and that he be ordered to cease and desist such injurious actions. I know of no other NFL player who has done what Mr. Ayanbadejo is doing."

 Burns cc'ed his letter to the media, and has since learned of at least one other NFL player who agrees with Brendan Ayanbadejo.

"I've also been vocal as hell about the issue of gay marriage so you can take your 'I know of no other NFL player who has done what Mr. Ayanbadejo is doing' and shove it in your close-minded, totally lacking in empathy piehole and choke on it. Asshole."

So wrote Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe in a very profane but otherwise quite eloquent broadside to the preacher-turned-politician-turned-censor.

 "What on earth would possess you to be so mind-boggingly stupid? It baffles me that a man such as yourself, a man who relies on that same First Amendment to pursue your own religious studies without fear of persecution from the state, could somehow justify stifling another person's right to speech. ...

 "'Many of your fans are opposed to such a view and feel it has no place in a sport that is strictly for pride, entertainment, and excitement.' Holy fucking shitballs. Did you seriously just say that, as someone who's 'deeply involved in government task forces on the legacy of slavery in Maryland'? Have you not heard of Kenny Washington? Jackie Robinson? As recently as 1962 the NFL still had segregation, which was only done away with by brave athletes and coaches daring to speak their mind and do the right thing, and you're going to say that political views have 'no place in a sport'?"

It is Kluwe's letter on Deadspin that has turned this story from a local one to a national, but I've chosen to highlight the original center of controversy.

Besides, I'm a Packer fan. It's really, really, really, really, unbelievably, stupendously, insanely, Herculeanly hard to force myself to say anything nice about a Viking.

Q Toon: Maryland! My Maryland!

The cause of marriage equality in Maryland was dealt a surprise setback last week when the state House of Representatives unexpectedly failed to pass a bill that had already passed in the more conservative Senate. Lacking enough support to pass, the bill was sent back to the Judiciary Committee -- a committee that had almost killed the bill the week before.

From an editorial in the Washington Blade:

A couple of political careers likely imploded during this process, including those of Dels. Jill Carter (D-Baltimore City) and Sam Arora (D-Montgomery County). Carter and Del. Tiffany Alston stunned backers of the Civil Marriage Protection Act by staying away from a meeting of the House Judiciary Committee in which a vote on the marriage bill was scheduled to take place, and announced they would not vote on the measure until Democratic leaders paid more attention to other issues they feel are equally important. Both Carter and Alston are co-sponsors of the marriage bill. Where was House Speaker Michael Busch when we needed him to keep these selfish renegades in line?

And Arora, who campaigned as a supporter of marriage equality and accepted financial contributions from LGBT people across the state and beyond, also yanked his support, triggering a flood of angry responses on his Facebook page and calls for him to refund those donations. Arora represents liberal Montgomery County. And his betrayal represents the end of his young political career.

A major factor in the debacle was the opposition from African-American delegates, pressured by clergy in their districts, who took offense at LGBT claims that marriage equality is a "civil rights issue." From the Baltimore Sun:

Del. Emmett C. Burns Jr. delivered the day's longest speech, blasting same-sex marriage supporters for calling the issue one of civil rights.
"Those who want to ride on our coattails are historically incorrect," said Burns, an African-American Democrat from Baltimore County. He said gay people had not endured the struggles of blacks, had not had crosses burned on their lawns or been thrown in a police wagon.

I drew about this argument several years ago:



To comment on race relations is to step into a mine field, at least if you're a person of no color; no less if one is a cartoonist putting words into the mouths of other people. The United States has a shameful history of slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, segregation and pervasive discrimination against African Americans (which continues today in the stubborn refusal of many people to accept the overwhelming evidence that Barack Obama is in fact a natural born citizen and duly elected President of the United States). But I cannot accept the idea that my civil rights are not civil rights because the term "civil rights" is the exclusive property of African Americans. Are women's civil rights "historically incorrect" because crosses weren't burned on their lawns?

The U.S. Supreme Court has had to address marriage equality before. Within my lifetime (and the lifetime of President Obama and every member of the current Court), it was illegal in many states for persons of different races to marry. If Loving v. Virginia was not a civil rights case, what was it?

The Court rejected the state's argument that the statute was legitimate because it applied equally to both blacks and whites and found that racial classifications were not subject to a "rational purpose" test under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court also held that the Virginia law violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. "Under our Constitution," wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren, "the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State."

Each struggle for civil rights has something to differentiate it from other struggles -- gas chambers, rape, employment discrimination, having one's land taken away or being taken away from one's land. There are also things that we have in common. Contrary to Rev. Burns, we were indeed thrown in the backs of police wagons. Likewise, antebellum laws did not recognize slaves' marriage rights. To focus solely on the differences is as pointless as suggesting that the experiences of African-Americans in Hawai'i made them less deserving of civil rights than African-Americans in Mississippi.