Toon: The 60% Solution

At the risk of giving GQP politicians ideas...

On April 29, well ahead of its usual timetable of issuing rulings in June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a congressional map that had been the result of a lawsuit against Louisiana's 2021 redistricting plan. A lower court had ruled that the 2021 map packed the state's Black voters into a single congressional district in violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The Supremes continued their gutting of that Act, decreeing that as long as lawmakers are not actually wearing swastikas and Klan robes when they draw congressional district lines, they can discriminate against whomever they want.

Louisiana Republicans immediately called a halt to the state's primary elections in which early voting was already underway, so that they could re-redraw district boundaries. (Yesterday’s Senate primary went right on ahead as scheduled.) Fellow Republicans in Tennessee, Alabama, and Utah hurriedly followed suit.

This mid-decade scramble to jigger maps to tilt districts against Democrats was started by Donald Gimme-Gimme Trump's gerrymandering demand to the state of Texas — a demand with which Texan Republicans eagerly and speedily complied. 

Democrats have attempted to answer Texas's unprecedented move, but with mixed results. California drew up new Democrat-favoring maps; but Maryland refused to. New York is constitutionally prevented from mid-decade redistricting, and Virginia's high court tossed out a pro-redistricting popular vote on a legislative technicality that nobody seems to quite understand. The Supreme Court in D.C., after rushing to overrule the lower court ruling in Louisiana, has just decided to let the ruling in Virginia stand without comment.

Is my cartoon really such a far-fetched notion? I wouldn't put it past today's ReTrumplicans to push exactly this idea through every legislature in Dixie and the Great Plains.

...In with the Old

In keeping with the turn to a fresh calendar this week, Our Graphical History Tour moves on to a New Year: 1926

"The Cut-in Dance" by Fred G. Cooper in Life, New York, Dec. 31, 1925

Judging from most cartoonists of the time, Americans entered 1926 with a carefree optimism for the future that we who dwell in it can only envy.

"Yes, Sir, He's Our Baby" by J.T. Alley in Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tenn., Jan. 1, 1926

As with every other holiday that year, editorial cartoonists celebrated the nation's apparent prosperity. Senate Republican leader Charles Curtis promised the Washington Times,

"Our nation greets the New Year healthy and prosperous with the benefits of a kindly Providence scattered far and wide. The outlook for the next twelve months is particularly encouraging, with all signs pointing to a continuing prosperity for all alike. The present wave of prosperity, in which all the people are sharing, will last throughout the year."

Senator Curtis would be Vice President when the wave of prosperity washed out in 1929.

"The Morning After" by Jim Ring in Washington [DC] Times, Jan. 1, 1926

In the meantime, Jim Ring depicted Father Time ditching the robe and scythe in favor of an apron and broom, the better to sweep away the bad habits of 1925.

"The New Broom" by Grover Page in Louisville Courier-Journal, Jan. 1, 1926

According to Grover Page, that was more appropriately the New Year Baby's job.

"The Skeptic" by H.T. Webster for New York World Pub. Co., Jan. 1, 1926

Harold Webster's New Year Kid was not about to settle for the post of janitor. The little man was already out of diapers and ready to take over as Operations Manager.

"I Wish Old Man '25 Had Left a Clean Desk" by William C. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, Jan. 1, 1926

Would sitting down at Mr. Globehead’s desk bring the kid back down to size?

We have covered some of the tasks in Morris’s cartoon before: from coal mine strikes and lockouts, to French wartime debts, to colonial wars in Morocco and Iraq, to worldwide disarmament, to crime and Prohibition in the U.S., to whether to join the World Court.

But we haven’t mentioned the Tacna-Arica Situation, a border disagreement between Peru and Chile that would be settled by the Lima Agreement of 1929. So now you know.

"With Best Wishes for a Happy New Year" by J. Conagher in Life, New York, Dec. 31, 1925

J. (or F.?) Conagher's cartoon has little to do with the new year save for its caption. Rather, it's a complaint against the social reformers who brought about Prohibition and were pressing for further laws against smoking, restricting content of movies, and so forth.

And while we're on the topic of unresolved problems carrying over into the new year, Leslie Rogers had a specific issue:

"A Satisfactory Year for Him" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Jan. 2, 1926

There had been 12 Black Americans lynched in 1925 by the Chicago Defender's count. A Rogers cartoon about the most recent, of Lindsey Coleman in Clarksdale, Mississippi, appeared in our Graphical History Tour just before Christmas.

"Low and Order at Last" by Fred B. Watson in Afro-American, Jan. 2, 1926

A jury had found Coleman, a Black veteran of World War I, innocent of the axe murder of plantation store manager Grover Nicholas, brother of one of the men who then seized Coleman as he was leaving the courthouse. They dragged him into their car, drove him out of town, and shot him 26 times.

Tom Nicholas, J.T. Trayham, H.S. Blockley and G.O. Kane were arrested and charged with Coleman's murder. But while it must have come as a disappointment to Fred Watson, it should come as no surprise to students of history today that the charges against the four were dropped before the case was ever brought to trial.

As for Grover Nicholas's murder, two Black men, Ray Ford Leonard and John Fisher were found guilty on the testimony, later recanted, of Albert Hobbs. Another alleged party to the crime, Smith Bunns, died in jail, supposedly from an epileptic fall, within hours of his arrest.

"Happy New Year" by Orville P. Williams in New York Evening Journal (?), Jan. 1, 1926

White editorial cartoonist O.P. Williams offered his readers a cartoon encouraging tolerance in the new year. I've posted a number of his cartoons against the Ku Klux Klan, so I'll give him credit for as much sincerity on the issue as I'll give President Coolidge, who may have inspired this cartoon.

Toward the end of his December 8, 1925 annual message to Congress, Coolidge had this to say about racial, ethnic, and religious tolerance in the U.S.:

"Our country has many elements in its population, many different modes of thinking and living, all of which are striving in their own way to be loyal to the high ideals worthy of the crown of American citizenship. It is fundamental of our institutions that they seek to guarantee to all our inhabitants the right to live their own lives under the protection of the public law. This does not include any license to injure others materially, physically, morally, to Incite revolution, or to violate the established customs which have long bad the sanction of enlightened society.

"But it does mean the full right to liberty and equality before the law without distinction of race or creed. This condition can not be granted to others, or enjoyed by ourselves, except by the application of the principle of broadest tolerance. Bigotry is only another name for slavery. It reduces to serfdom not only those against whom it is directed, but also those who seek to apply it. An enlarged freedom can only be secured by the application of the golden rule. No other utterance ever presented such a practical rule of life."

"Speeding the Transient" by Gustavo Bronstrup in San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 1, 1926

On that note, I'm afraid it's time to slide along ourselves. Thanks for coming along on this sweep through history!

Toon: Condemned to Repeat It

After 49 years of promising their voters to appoint justices to the Supreme Court for the express purpose of overturning Roe v. Wade — and the kabuki theater of those appointees testifying to Senate Judiciary Commitees that honest pinky-swear cross-my-heart they carried no such agenda —Republicans are finally getting their wish.

Unless you've just recovered from a coma, you already know about that Justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion eviscerating Roe v. Wade was leaked to Politico, and you probably know that one of the main points of his opinion is that abortion rights (or the prohibition of them) is a matter to be decided between a woman and her statehouse, governor, Congress, President... anyone "from the government and I'm here to help."

Effective abortion bans are set to snap into place in 26 states the instant the Court's ruling is handed down. Some have been passed recently or will be soon; in other states, old laws voided by the Court's 1973 ruling (such as Wisconsin's 1849 law) will arise from their graves.

Just about all of these abortion bans, old and new, presuppose that women who seek abortions are unprincipled whores likely to wait right up until moments before going into labor to abort their unwanted fetus instead. That they deserve for each and every sexual act to result in nine months of hard labor.

I know from the experience of someone close to me that the decision to terminate a pregnancy is never easy, and sometimes the baby was very much wanted. If I had been in her place and had been told to go home and wait to miscarry, I would have reached the same decision she did.

If you're a woman or girl living in a state where Republicans do not exercise a stranglehold on your legislature, chances are you will get to keep the right to determine your own child-bearing decisions — at least as long as there's a Democrat in the White House. But anywhere else, your chances are awfully remote, and largely thanks to Court decisions made along the way with this day in mind.

Republicans took advantage of their state legislative wins in 2010 to cement their momentary majorities into permanent ones through the redistricting process and erecting barriers against voters apt to vote for Democrats — and Republican judges have backed them up. Right-wing activists regularly flood the airwaves in election years to promote anti-abortion candidates — and again, Republican judges (many of them having been themselves beneficiaries of those floods) have backed them up.

Federally, Republicans use the free and easy filibuster rules in the Senate to block any and all Democratic legislation — and you can bet that if there are 51 of them in the Senate next year, Mitch McConnell will get rid of the filibuster to pass a total nation-wide ban on abortion. Even if the Roman Catholic in the Oval Office today vetoes it, the GOP retains its numerical advantage in the electoral college in 2024 that we saw in 2000 and 2016.

If the immediate future for women's reproductive rights looks bleak now, so too did the prospects of the anti-abortion movement in 1973. But they kept working toward Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization with unrelenting, calculated determination, and here we are.

Can the other side match that effort — even if it takes another half-century?

Q Toon: Stiff as a Board

 

This week's cartoon could be about Walt Disney Corporation standing up (a bit tardily) to Florida state Republicans for passing "Don't Say Gay" into law, but having just drawn a cartoon about that law last week, I took a more generic approach this week.

Republican-dominated legislatures in one state after another after another have been attacking the LGBTQ+ community, especially transgender minors, with full fury this year.

The Alabama House of Representatives voted 66-28 for legislation to make it a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a doctor to prescribe puberty blockers or hormones or perform surgery to aid in the gender transition of people under age 19. The bill now goes to Republican Gov. Kay Ivey for her signature as Alabama becomes the latest red state to promote legislation and policies aimed at trans youth.

and

The Arizona Legislature passed bills Thursday to prohibit gender reassignment surgery for minors and ban transgender athletes from playing on girls sports teams, joining a growing list of Republican-controlled states attempting to restrict transgender rights as they gain more visibility in culture and society.

and

Texas Republicans’ growing focus on what they call “child gender modification” is the latest illustration of the state’s swing to the right after the 2020 election. And it reached an apex as both Abbott and Paxton were in the final days of primaries where they were getting pressured from their right over the issue.

and I haven't even gotten to the copycat "Don't Say Gay" legislation.

As I noted last week, Walt Disney Co. is only one of some 200 corporations protesting Florida's new law; major corporations across the country have done likewise in these other states.

But it has hardly deterred Republicans in any of them.

The GQP has such a lock on voters in gated communities, rural Mayberries, and the Foxosphere, that it hardly needs campaign cash from its American oligarchs any more. At least not on the national level. Thus it has turned its focus to local offices, especially school boards, brainwashing gullible Karens and Kevins that educators are teaching kindergartners post-graduate-level courses on sexuality, race, and Marxist dialectic.

(Well, they're right about the Marxist dialectic stuff. Only the schools call it "learning to share.") 

Perhaps it's time for responsible corporations, rather than pulling their advertising from right-wing media, to buy air time on Hannity and Tuckyo Rose. What these corporations say on Facebook and Twitter doesn't get past the algorithms and filters to get to the people who get all their opinions from Fox & Fiends.

Oh, who am I kidding?

What these corporations say on Facebook and Twitter about valuing LGBTQ+ employees and customers isn't half as important to them as larding up all levels of government with politicians who will gladly gut consumer safety laws, and ignore employee working conditions.

And most importantly, slash the corporation's tax burden. Those consumers and employees can pick up the cost.

One for the Ladies

If it's Suffragette Saturday, it must be time to check in on the progress of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution 100 years ago this month.

"It's a Long Lane That Has No Turning" by O.P. Williams in Los Angeles Evening Herald New York Journal, June 18, 1919

Passage of the amendment had failed in the Senate by one vote back in February after passage in the House. Congress then adjourned in April, but heeding demands of the suffragettes, President Wilson called Congress into special session in May. The House again passed the amendment on May 21, 1919; and this time, it finally passed the Senate with two votes to spare (56 to 25) on June 4, 1919.

"Kissing the Bride" by Bob Satterfield, June, 1919

Illinois was first to ratify the amendment on June 10, followed quickly by Michigan and Wisconsin. Suffragists wanted the amendment ratified in time for the 1920 elections, but contrary to Bob Satterfield's cartoon, ratification of the 19th Amendment was not going to be quite as rapid as it had been for the 18th.

Detail from "Cartoons of the Day" by John T. McCutcheon for Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1919

For one thing, many state legislatures were out of session for the summer. For another, there was stiff opposition throughout the South. (Mississippi would eventually get around to ratifying the amendment in the year of our Lord 1984.)

"Her 'Wallflower' Days Are Over" by Leo Thiele in Sioux City Tribune, June, 1919

Elsewhere, however, the potential cost of alienating such a huge voting bloc ensured that both parties had a vested interest in wooing those new voters. After all, any women who didn't think women deserved the vote weren't liable to come out to vote against the politicians who voted for suffrage, would they?

"The New Ringmaster" by J. Thomas in Bend (OR) Bulletin, June 20, 1919

Whereas the women who were eager to vote might take want to show up to the polls to tell the politicians who voted against it a thing or two.

"Like It?" by John Cassel in New York Evening World, June 6, 1919

Like it? You'd better get used to it.

"Nose Powder an' Hair Pins" by Bill Donahey in Cleveland Plain Dealer, June, 1919

August 1993

Enough of the century-old cartoons for a moment. I realize that it's important to throw in posts every so often that are relevant to the Millennials. Therefore, for someone having a 25th birthday in August, here's what your uncle was drawing the month you were born.

Kenosha, Wisconsin joined the roster of mass shootings on August 10, 1993. As the Kenosha News reported:

On a sunny afternoon, Aug. 10, 1993, Dion Terres walked into the McDonald's restaurant at 75th Street and Pershing Blvd. and fired three random shots from a .44 Magnum revolver, killing two customers and wounding a third. Then Terres took his own life.
Bruce Bojesen, a 50-year-old Silver Lake carpenter who had come to Kenosha to buy a dog collar, died on the spot. Sandra Kenaga, 42, owner of a hair styling business near the restaurant, was shot as she dined with co-workers. She died in the hospital the next morning.
Eighteen-year-old Kirk Hauptmann was wounded, but escaped from the restaurant to a nearby supermarket to summon police. When officers arrived on the scene, they found that 25-year-old Terres had shot himself to death.
The loss of lives could have been far greater, police said. A semi-automatic weapon was found next to his car in the McDonald's parking lot. Inside the vehicle was a 30-round clip for the weapon and the gunman had another 30 rounds. Officers speculated Terres had accidentally locked the clip in his auto and, forgetting he had another 30 bullets, dropped the automatic rifle on the ground.

The shooting captured national attention for a time, with calls, as one would expect, for gun control legislation. Locally, there were also complaints from people (not patrons, obviously) that the McDonald's on 75th and Pershing reopened for business the next day.

Now, I know you're not a fan of gun control. I'm not into guns, but I'm not into this gun confiscation fantasy that the NRA sells, either. Heck, I've fired a gun or three myself.

It was my first visit to your place after you were born, so you wouldn't remember it. I remember that my first three shots with that rifle hit the target some 100 yards away. After that, my success was more in tune with what you'd expect from a novice; and with a .22 pistol, I couldn't hit my target at all.

Seeing this photo was my first discovery that I was growing a bald spot back where I couldn't see it in the mirror. With any luck, you've inherited the hair gene from elsewhere in your family tree. But if you've been thinking of sporting a mohawk someday, you probably shouldn't put it off.

It's a question people who have lost their homes in this year's California wildfires are sure to be asked: how can people build homes in the path of disaster?

The natural disasters in the above cartoon each happened two years apart, in 1993, 1989 and 1991. I posted another cartoon about the Mississippi River flooding of '93 a few weeks ago; the Loma Prieta earthquake hit the bay area just before a World Series game; you can ask your mother about her experience with Hurricane Andrew.

In response to these disasters, whole towns picked up and moved away from the Mighty Mississippi; efforts continue to reinforce freeways, bridges, and buildings to improve their resistance to earthquakes. But with climate change bringing ever stronger hurricanes nearly every year, it seems that mankind has few options other than improving early warning and evacuation systems.

Moving on from acts of God:

The Ceil Pillsbury settlement story is local to University of  Wisconsin at Milwaukee but became a cause celèbre in conservative circles statewide; Pillsbury was a professor at the university who claimed she had been denied tenure because she was a woman and pregnant. She had been the only one of four Business School candidates denied tenure in 1989 in spite of having had seven articles published and been named Faculty Member of the Year by the Business School's advisory council.

She had always discounted stories of sex discrimination, believing that they had to be false or merely isolated incidents. "I never thought it was a systemic problem. At first, I didn't think there was any way it could be discrimination. As I talked to other women in the business school, it was clear to me what had happened all along. Women were just not in a position to succeed."

Whether the school's denial of tenure was because she was the only female candidate that year or because she was a lifelong conservative Republican, the University ended up agreeing to pay Pillsbury over $125,000 and to rehire her with a salary commensurate with a tenured professor whether it granted her tenure or not. Ultimately, of course, it was students and taxpayers who ended up footing the bill.

Well, that's the sum total of my work in August of 1993. Not much of a unifying theme here. There was other stuff I could have drawn about yet didn't, most notably the nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, but off-year Augusts are usually News Doldrum months.

Tune in again next week for some even-year August cartoons instead.

Gaze of Future Past

I'm only rewinding the calendar 25 years or so for this installment of Selfback Saturday. We're wrapping up LGBTQ Pride Month, which will serve to touch off this recollection of some cartoons I drew for the Minnesota LGBTQ press in 1993.

This is not one of them.

The previous summer, my dear friend Jeff Crump asked me to parody a syndicated editorial cartoon by Chris Britt that had appeared in the Fargo Forum July 25, 1992. The original had made fun of the LGBTQ community using various crude stereotypes; Jeff described to me the cartoon he wanted me to draw, replacing Britt's crude stereotypes with equally crude stereotypical features of Minnesota festival-goers.

My parody ran in Gaze Magazine, a predecessor to the current Lavender Magazine of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Running about 64 pages to the typical issue, it was printed on newsprint in black-and-white, save for some purple on the front and back cover.

I followed that cartoon up with a series of editorial cartoons. I didn't have a computer at the time, and I didn't have the relationship with Gaze's editors that I had had with other distant newspapers such as the NorthCountry Journal. Not being au courant with Minnesota LGBTQ news, my cartoons tended to deal with national topics.

The above cartoon from May of 1993 hints that maybe the country hasn't moved forward very much in the quarter century since. No, military brass were not being turned away from restaurants a la Sarah Huckabee Sanders; I concocted the scenario to spoof Pentagon worries that openly gay or lesbian personel in the military would be bad for troop morale.

Then as now, a five-to-four conservative majority on the Supreme Court caused no end of stress to liberals hoping to protect Civil Rights gains from the 1960s and 70s. What passed for the "liberal" wing of the Court were justices appointed by Nixon and Ford; the lone Justice to have been appointed by a Democratic president, "Whizzer" White, usually voted with the conservatives. He resigned on June 28, 1993, and would be replaced by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the fall.

The above cartoon from July referred to a ruling that merely showing that a business or government had demonstrated a pattern of racial or gender discrimination was not enough to prove a specific instance of discrimination. No, said the Court, the aggrieved party must uncover a written policy or some other public confession that he or she was discriminated against.

What else is familiar from 1993? Well, we had a billionaire who told us he had all the answers...

...(just not necessarily with him right now)...

...And a sex offender as president.

Is it progress, then, that 25 years later, we've got the same guy fulfilling both roles?

Bill Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy for gays in the military sparked many of the cartoons that I drew for Gaze, and for In Step and Q Syndicate after that. For all the dire warnings of the danger gays and lesbians would pose to troop morale, it's amazing how little troop morale is in the news ever since President Obama ended the policy.

We may yet discover how troop morale is affected when Donald Trump gets around to reversing that Obama action.

In spite of having next to no interaction with Gaze's editors, I did manage to send them at least one cartoon touching on a Minnesota topic. The spring of 1993 brought spectacular flooding of the Mississippi River and its upper tributaries. Traveling from Minneapolis to St. Peter, a bus I was taking to a convention was forced to take several detours to avoid flooded bridges that were no longer over the Minnesota River but under it.

We've come almost full circle from offensive stereotypes to offensive puns, so that will wrap it up for another thrilling episode of Selfback Saturday. Tune in again next Saturday to see what else I can find to distract myself from the Eve of DisTrumption!

Q Toon: Gonna Party Like It's 1921

I figured that enough of the weekly papers which run my cartoon are going to run "double issues" this week (meaning that they won't publish next week), that their editors will be looking for something with a year-end theme.

Donald Berzilius Trump is assembling an incredibly right-wing cabinet. Recent Democratic presidents have always felt compelled to include some Republicans in their cabinet; Barack Obama named three to his inaugural cabinet and was vilified as a ultra-liberal extremist anyway. Even George W. Bush named a token Democrat as Secretary of Transportation. There's no seat at the table in Trump's White House for anyone but Republican ideologues, tycoons and racists, however.

But since I draw for the LGBT press, I couldn't draw this cartoon without sounding the alarm for the future of marriage equality.

If you think my concern is unwarranted, consider all the efforts in Republican statehouses to legislate marriage inequality. In Arkansas, the state Supreme Court ruled that while husband and wife are both recorded as parents to a child, even if one of them is not related by blood, same-sex parents are not.

Several states have put forth so-called religious liberty laws to the effect that anyone can discriminate against same-sex couples as long as they claim religious belief as their excuse. And by anyone, the U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that that means any corporation: your employer can refuse family leave, your insurer can refuse to cover your spouse; your hospital can refuse to let one spouse make decisions on behalf of (or even visit) an unconscious spouse.

It's not just wedding cakes, and with no check on their power, Republicans have promised that it's about to go national.

Q Toon: Keeping the Kids Safe

It should be noted that the state legislator in this week's cartoon is begin facetious from Frame One. The statute of limitations on Former Speaker Hastert's alleged sexual assaults expired decades ago. He was convicted of circumventing banking rules in order to pay hush money to one of his victims. He paid $1.7 million to a student whose groin he barely remembers having merely brushed in order to treat a pulled muscle, if you buy his defense.

Then there is the weird story of the leather recliner Hastert positioned in the locker room so that he could watch his wrestlers while they showered. Don't bother trying to imagine how he explained that expense to the school administration; school athletic departments have always gotten considerably more deference than, say, the English department.

Nevertheless, the deal with the recliner was pretty ballsy. I remember that after gym class at my junior high school in the 1970's, we had to parade through a shower room, towels held up above the spray, while the gym teacher stood on an raised platform enclosed by a wall that came up about his chest-level in the center of the shower room, watching to make sure that we were actually getting wet or something.

There were whispers that our coach was enjoying the show more than necessary, but at least he had to stand up. He wasn't relaxing comfortably in an overstuffed La-Z-Boy.

✒

Coming back to the present, Rep. Jeremy Durham (R-Natcherly), a vocal co-sponsor of the Bathroom Bill speeding through Tennessee's state legislature, has just been found to have a habit of sexually harassing women who have the misfortune to work in his vicinity. The allegations are so numerous that the Secretary of State has issued an official warning that "Representative Durham's alleged behavior may pose a continuing risk to unsuspecting women who are employed by or interact with the legislature." The Speaker of the Tennessee House Beth Harwell has banished Durham from his office, exiling him to an office across the street.

No word on whether he gets to take his La-Z-Boy recliner with him.

Q Toon: Mississcrimination Comes to a Head

Good Lord, people, this is the third week in a row I've had to come up with something about anti-LGBT "religious freedom" laws. States are passing them faster than I can draw them: this week, it was Mississippi, with Kansas also putting a bounty on transgendered students trying to take a bathroom break at school.

Lawmakers in Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, Tennessee, and (no surprise) Wisconsin have also hopped on the transbashing bathroom bill bandwagon.

For measures requiring that bathrooms be sex-segregated, the lawmakers needed to decide how, precisely, they would define biological sex. They used a range of definitions, and in two the definition was tautological (“as biologically defined”)
Other bills got a lot more specific. Thirteen specified that chromosomes should be taken into account to define sex, but only Indiana’s House Bill 1079 was detailed enough to say that a female was defined as someone with “at least one X chromosome and no Y chromosome” and that males included everyone with “at least one X chromosome and at least one Y chromosome.”

A friend tells me that he heard a caller in to one of those right-wingnut talk radio shows (and really, is there any other kind?) voice his support of this sort of legislation because he wanted his daughter to be able to use a public ladies' rest room without some guy waving his junk around at the next urinal.

I'll just give you a moment to think about that one.

This Week's Sneak Peek

In lieu of the usual snippet from the cartoon coming later this week, here's one I drew for the Twin Cities LGBT newsmagazine Gaze in July, 1993, the year of great flooding along the upper Mississippi River and several tributaries in the midwest.

I was en route to a church secretaries' conference in St. Peter, Minnesota that summer, traveling by bus. I stopped to visit friends in Minneapolis before boarding the bus down to St. Peter. The bus ended up having to make a number of detours because high water in the Minnesota River had overtopped some bridges and roadways and was threatening others. I ended up arriving at Gustavus Adolphus College quite late, missing the opportunity to be interviewed by a Minneapolis Tribune reporter who wanted to talk to the three of us male secretaries at the overwhelmingly female conference.

Since both of the pastors at the church where I work happened at the time to be women, I suppose I could been an interesting addition to the article. (In fact, both pastors are still women, although one now works at the synod level, not at the church.)

Q Toon: Sermon at the Counter II

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

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

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

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

Q Toon: Kenya Matata

President Obama visited Eastern Africa during this past week, and during a press conference with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta in Nairobi, he was asked about gay rights, which very few African countries respect. He answered:

"If somebody is a law abiding citizen who is going about their business and working in a job and obeying the traffic signs and doing all the other things that good citizens are supposed to do, and not harming anybody, the idea that they are going to be treated differently or abused because of who they love is wrong. Full stop. ... When you start treating people differently not because of any harm they're doing anybody but because they're different, that's the path whereby freedoms begin to erode and bad things happen."

Under Kenyan law, sexual activity between men is illegal and may result in a prison sentence of up to 14 years. Kenyatta, described by Politico as "clearly uncomfortable, fidgeting at the podium,"  dismissed the topic entirely: "The issue of gay rights is a non-issue."

Given recent events in marriage equality in the United States and the horrible record in many African countries on LGBT rights, that the topic would come up during President Obama's visit was widely anticipated. A planned naked protest against Obama for his pro-gay stand had been canceled hours before his visit. Organizers claimed that 3,600 had signed up to participate in the protest before some unidentified 2:00 in the morning caller persuaded them to cancel.

One shudders to imagine such a protest in this country. I don't want to see thousands of naked Kentucky county clerks, Alabama judges, Mississippi cake bakers, Arkansas florists, Texas legislators, Scott Lively, Franklin Graham and Maggie Gallagher flapping and flopping their way up Pennsylvania Avenue, do you?

Q Toon: Sermon at the Counter

As if last week's two marriage equality cartoons crammed into one weren't enough, I've got another one this week. Thumbing through almost 20 years of my cartoons on the subject, I'm surprised that I have anything left to say about it.

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q Syndicate✒Jul 9, 2015 EditorialCartoonists.com

The "y'all" betrays the setting of this cartoon as being somewhere in the South, and that picture on the wall is supposed to be Texas Governor Greg Abbott. The news out of the Lone Star State is that with the encouragement of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, County Clerks in Irion County and Hoods County have publicly vowed not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

But I could easily have set this cartoon almost anywhere in the South:

• A gay couple was denied a marriage license in Rowan County, Kentucky (they don't get up to the counter until ten minutes into the video at that link).
• Offices in Louisiana and Mississippi dragged their feet as hard as they could, hoping that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals would somehow overrule the Supreme Court. "There is not yet a legal requirement for officials to issue marriage licenses or perform marriages for same-sex couples in Louisiana," wrote that state's Attorney General, Buddy Caldwell after the high court ruling.
• Pike and Geneva Counties in Alabama have announced that in order not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, they won't issue marriage licenses to anyone at all, and other counties may follow suit.
• Kansas will issue same-sex marriage licenses, but for some reason doesn't want those couples to file joint tax returns. (Some people would classify Kansas as a midwestern state, but it was part of the Confederacy, and I reckon that's South enough for me.)

Q Toon: Mississippi Frosting

Last Thursday, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant signed a law similar to the one vetoed by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer last month guaranteeing a right to discriminate against anyone you think is a heathen, sinner, apostate, heretic, infidel, or -- oh, come on, you know it's all about Teh Gay.

Unlike Governor Brewer, Bryant isn't worried about losing Super Bowls or convention business to other states.

“I am proud to sign the Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which will protect the individual religious freedom of Mississippians of all faiths from government interference,” Gov. Phil Bryant said in a statement. 

Indeed, the Governor and the state legislature look forward to welcoming any number of wacko cults flocking to set up shop in the fertile soil of the Magnolia State.

The Mississippification of Wisconsin

Bruce Murphy has a great piece in Milwaukee Magazine on the latest move by Governor Scott Walker to destroy Wisconsin's education system. Having gotten legislative approval (on hold by the courts) to devalue public school teachers, to tie school districts' hands when working out their own budgets, and to increase the diversion of Milwaukee public school money to private "choice" schools, he now wants to remove all accountability by those choice schools.

While public schools are required to administer standardized tests to all students to measure whether children are learning anything, Walker proposes that choice schools should no longer be required to do the same. He must want to cover up results like this:

The proportion of students who were proficient in reading and math was just 12 percent and 14 percent at Texas Bufkin Christian Academy; 17 percent and 6 percent at Travis Technology High School; 20 percent and 7 percent at Washington DuBois Christian Leadership Academy; 23 percent and 9 percent at Right Step, Inc.; 18 percent and 0 percent (Did no one take the math test?) at Dr Brenda Noach Choice School; 16 percent and 9 percent at Destiny High School. You get the feeling some of these schools worked harder on creating their name than educating the students.

Granted, as Murphy points out in the third part of his column, some choice schools, particularly Notre Dame Middle School, actually score above the state average. But I'd be surprised if even one public school did as badly as the six named above.

Meanwhile, as pointed out in another article today by Dave Zwiefel for the Capitol Times, Walker and the Republicans are following the Chamber of Commerce directive to deregulate business, depress wages, and shift the tax burden from those who make money to those who work for it. The Chamber, and their Republican minions, say that Wisconsin has a bad business climate. They would like to refashion Wisconsin in the style of, say, Mississippi.

[I]n its wisdom the U.S. Chamber ranked the state of Mississippi high on its list of places with good labor and employment policies.

Never mind that according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Mississippi has the lowest per-person income in the country and the lowest life expectancy. Its education system is ranked 47th among the 50 states and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which measures states on how well their children are treated, says that Mississippi is the worst state in America.

Cheer up, Mississippi! As long as Scott Walker and his Republican legislature have anything to say about it, Wisconsin is joining the race to the bottom!

Itawamba Prom or Not

In Fulton County, Mississippi, a high school student named Constance McMillen wanted to take her girlfriend to this year's prom. Naturally, the school decided to cancel the prom. McMillen sued, and the school begrudgingly reinstated the prom.

Only McMillen, her date, and seven others, mostly developmentally challenged students, showed up.

All the other kids were across town at a private party set up by their parents and deliberately kept secret from McMillen and whatever social outcasts didn't get the word. The party had the same theme and the same decorations that had been intended for the original prom, but this being a "private party," legal issues of equal access and non-discrimination were rendered moot. All the other kids had a swell time, and posted pictures of themselves on the internet on their "Constance, Quit Yer Cryin'" Facebook group. (They quickly took the public page private after the photos appeared on a number of LGBT blogs; Alvin McEwen, posting on Pam Spaulding's Pam's House Blend is one blogger who has refused to un-post the photos:

I don't feel sorry for you students of Itawamba Agricultural High School who are now feeling the blowback from what you did.

You got played by the school. My guess is that when school officials canceled the prom, they expected you all to make McMillen the scapegoat and you did with as much fervor as a pack of wild dogs in Call of the Wild.

So you decided to hold a party, making sure to steer McMillen away to a fake prom. You celebrated like you won a big victory, and then to make matters worse, you gloated about what you did in a public manner designed to humiliate McMillen.

What exactly did you think would happen?

Since then, Constance has herself asked people enraged on her behalf to lay off. There were some vicious comments about the "Constance Quit Yer Cryin'" kids left on the Facebook page before it was taken private, and at least one blogger has gone so far as to try to post the identities of students in the photos.

Just for the record, none of the characters in this week's cartoon is a caricature of any person in those photos. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. There's no legal necessity involved; I just wanted to make clear that I'm not piling on any particular individual. There is plenty of calumny to go around, as far as I'm concerned.

Meanwhile, there seems to be no shortage of people stepping forth to offer invitations to Constance to attend LGBT-friendly proms in the weeks ahead. While they're at it, I hope some high-profile, well-respected person popular in those parts offers to chaperon Constance across the stage at graduation. I expect she'll need some support at that moment.