Oh, the Humanity

Everyone else is doing it, so why not get in on the fun?

And, of course,

Q Toon: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

I'm not a fan of exceptionally wordy cartoons, but when one is taking a fairly obscure Congressman to task for a comment to an equally obscure administration official, it's quite likely that the story didn't get a lot of attention on the nightly news or comedy shows, and a good deal of explanation is in order.

So here's the cartoon:

Q Syndicate✍Feb 5, 2015

Congressman Christopher Smith (R-NJ) is chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations Subcommittee, where he questioned the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the State Department's Bureau of African Affairs, Robert Jackson, last week. Smith brushed off anyone's concerns about LGBT rights on the world's second largest continent:

"There are fundamental differences in the United States over the whole LGBT issue. I am a strong believer in traditional marriage, and do not construe 'homosexual rights' as 'human rights.'"

On the same day, Nigerian sharia police arrested twelve men on charges of celebrating a "gay wedding." Two weeks earlier, an Egyptian court had acquitted 26 men arrested at a public bathhouse only after their televised arrests had been splashed all over news and social media. Up and down the continent, governments, abetted by sensationalist news media, are whipping up hatred against lesbians and gays as a way to distract their citizens from poverty, tribal and religious rivalries, and their own kleptocracies.

Various LGBT advocacy groups have criticized Smith for his dismissive attitude toward the persecution of gays and lesbians from Algeria to Zimbabwe. Fellow subcommittee member David Cicilline (D-RI and openly gay) also responded to Smith:

"I would like to address these comments and clarify that the official position of the U.S. government is: all people have basic human rights. Regardless of their race, sex, disability, age, political opinion, or religion, they are entitled to the very fundamental right to be themselves, free from persecution. This includes people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender."

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.

Q Toon: Go Away. Kids, You Bother Me

It's late October, so whatever happens to be in the news is going to get the Halloween treatment by editorial cartoonists. So let's find something spooky about marriage equality coming to New Jersey:

I seem to be on a kick of cartooning governors lately. This one's not so obscure outside of his own state, but I figured I had better squeeze in an identifying label, anyway.

Q Toon: There's Got to Be a Morning After

If you were expecting a cartoon congratulating the victors of last night's election this morning, sorry. I had to have this week's cartoon to my syndicate by Monday morning, when the results were still unknown, and I figured there would be plenty of other cartoons out today exulting in the end of the nasty ads and incessant phone calls.

Mother Nature and the predictable religious idiots who blame every hurricane, earthquake and volcanic eruption on gays and lesbians provided me with today's non-election-related cartoon. Those religious idiots include a Pennsylvania pastor John McTernan, an upstate New York rabbi Noson Leiter, a Maryland pastor Luke Robinson, and some twisted ex-gay sister Lisa Miller.

Drawing water, by the way, is mighty tricky. It doesn't have a lot of corners. It doesn't sit still so you can draw its edges. It does have a mood: calm or angry, pleasant or turbulent. I've been looking all over (for a couple weeks, actually) for a book I have somewhere on the history of the comic strip; I remember there being an excellent drawing from the 1940's of Tarzan swimming through some angry water. There must have been some other example from Terry and the Pirates and Tintin, I'm sure.

You don't see a lot of today's editorial cartoonists or comic strip artists drawing with the evocative precision of Hal Foster (there are some choice examples of how to draw water at that link, by the way). Who has time to draw each individual raindrop? Just for kicks, here's a cartoon by Stuart Carlson. Here's one by Dave Granlund. And here's an example by Pat Bagley.

Q Toon: Meeting the Founding Fathers

Last week, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie vowed to veto any bill out of the state legislature extending marriage equality to same-sex couples.

When only judges had the temerity to find that the Constitution applies to gays and lesbians, conservatives would blast those "elitist judges" and call for legislatures to vote to keep homosexuals in their proper place. Now that legislative approval of marriage equality in New Jersey is all but guaranteed, the governor avers that the matter is too important to be left to the people's representatives and ought to be put to a vote of the people themselves.

My knee-jerk instinct was to draw parallels to the Black Civil Rights movement, but it seems Governor Christie has already done that:

“People would have been happy with a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets of the South.”

Likening the struggle for gay rights to other facets of the fight for civil rights, particularly for African-Americans, is debatable. Many on my side of the debate say that while the issues in both fights are not identical (I'll concede that there are more gays who are able to pass as straight than there are blacks who are able to pass as white), there are still significant similarities (you think LGBTs don't get lynched? It's called gay-bashing, and it still happens).

But out of respect for African American History Month, I decided to steer clear of that particular argument this week.

Besides, the ridiculous parallel I might have drawn had already come straight out of Christie's mouth. I'm pretty sure that referenda on civil rights would have gone down to defeat in many states in the '60's, and not just down in Dixie. I'm absolutely certain that the marriage of future President Obama's parents would have been voted down by the same caliber of people who today question his citizenship (I'm looking at you, Georgia Republicans).