Q Toon: Praise the Lord and Pass the Regulation

If nothing else, the Corrupt Trump Administration, for all its craziness and criminality, delivered for the right-wing "religious liberty" crowd. They carried him into power and has been unshakable in its loyalty to him throughout these four ghastly years, no matter how many pussies he boasted of grabbing, how many blatant lies he told, or how many of the seven deadly sins he could squeeze into a single tweet.

On Thursday, the day after Trump's Qult followers assaulted the Capitol, the Department of Health and Human Services finalized rules giving faith-based organizations the green light to discriminate against LGBTQ citizens at will. 

Most prominently, the new regulation would allow taxpayer-funded child welfare services to refuse placement into LGBTQ families or discriminate against LGBTQ youth. Religiously affiliated adoption and foster care centers have been pushing for this change in regulation, including Catholic Social Services in Philadelphia, which currently has a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court seeking a First Amendment right to reject same-sex couples on religious grounds.

This hardly comes as a surprise; Trump appointees who came into office at HHS arrived with a solid record of pushing back against LGBTQ rights. To head HHS's Office of Civil Rights, Trump brought in anti-LGBTQ activist Roger Severino, who has shown up in this here blog a handful of times.

Thursday's regulations had to be tweaked after first being published last June in order to satisfy the Supreme Court ruling in a couple of civil rights cases. The later addition of a fourth Justice likely to join Alito, Kavanaugh, and Thomas in dissent may not yet be enough to overturn last summer's ruling.

There, too, the religious right got what it wanted out of their thrice married failed casino owner who couldn't find Two Corinthians with a concordance.

By the way, I kind of expected some blowback over including a nun in this cartoon. But that was before I saw photos of Sisters of Our Lady of the Blessed Stable Genius indeed among the Qult of Trump at his rally.

h/t Jeff Parker

Probably antifa, right?

Has It Only Been Four Years?

January, 2017

Instead of reaching back a century for classic editorial cartoons, or a few decades for my early work, your faithful servant today limits today's post to the first two years of the Corrupt Trump Administration. His has been an extraordinarily long quadrennium, and it might be easy to have forgotten just how gawdawful his presidency was in the days before impeachment (remember that?) and COVID-19.

January, 2017

Donald Berzelius Trump's first priorities upon taking office was to erase every trace of Barack Obama's presidency, and one of the earliest things to disappear was the White House LGBT Liaison office and its corresponding web page.

March, 2017

From Day One, the principal qualification for cabinet and sub-cabinet posts in the Corrupt Trump Administration has been complete and total opposition to the department or agency one would be placed in charge of.

March, 2017

That includes Roger Severino, who is still in charge of dismantling HHS's Office for Civil Rights, and Betsy DeVos, still in charge of defunding public education.

March, 2017

Fossil fuel fanatic Scott Pruitt left the Environmental Protection Agency under a cloud of ethics violations in 2018. His replacement, coal industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, is hardly any improvement.

October, 2017

As Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions led the Corrupt Trump Administration's assault on the rights of minorities, especially the LGBTQ community. His one saving grace was that he did not see himself as the Trump family's personal lawyer, which is why he was replaced by lickspittle William Barr.

August, 2017

Trump has expended a lot of energy targeting transgender persons in general, and especially in the U.S. military. One of his justifications he gave for working to drum transgender personnel out of the military was the "tremendous" cost of their medical treatment... the total of which has proved to be far, far less than the cost of Trump's frequent golf trips. 

January, 2018

By the way, it was an exceptionally crass Trump tweet in June, 2017, alleging that a female cable TV host had been bleeding from cosmetic surgery, that got me to vow always to draw Trump with a pig's snout. His tweet came on top of a vulgar tweet about another female cable TV host menstruating, another tweet remarking that a female Republican senate candidate's face repulsed voters, and a retweet of a meme contrasting a flattering photo of Melania Trump with an unflattering one of a Republican senator's wife.

There was a flurry of pig-Trump cartoons that week; I have kept it as a leitmotif ever since, even when reconciling the snout with the needed facial expression was a real challenge. I have often also given him pig's hooves, thus breaking away from the editorial cartoon cliché of drawing him with tiny hands.

July, 2018

Let us not forget Trump's foreign policy, which consists largely of pissing off our democratic allies and sucking up to autocratic dictators. Especially the murderous ones.

July, 2018

You thought I was pivoting from foreign policy to the topic of our judicial system, didn't you? Well, perhaps you were right.

November, 2018

Through it all, Trump has behaved like a petty dictator, which explains his affinity for dictators abroad. He has been assisted by the Republican politburo in the House and Senate, and their mission to pack the courts with right-wing activists (which we discussed here more fully on Thursday).

January, 2018

Within the White House, we have Trump's Ministry of Truth, demonstrating why it's not such a great idea to run government like a business.

August, 2018

Q Toon: Now You See It

Shortly after I posted this cartoon to Q Syndicate, news of the Supreme Court's 6-3 decision that legal protections for LGBTQ employees are constitutional. Their rather surprising ruling, written by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, has overshadowed the Trump administration's having finalized rules eliminating nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ persons in health care and health insurance.

"HHS respects the dignity of every human being, and as we have shown in our response to the pandemic, we vigorously protect and enforce the civil rights of all to the fullest extent permitted by our laws as passed by Congress," said Roger Severino, who directs the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services, in a written statement announcing that the HHS rule had become final. The rule is set to go into effect by mid-August.
It is one of many rules and regulations put forward by the Trump administration that defines "sex discrimination" as only applying when someone faces discrimination for being female or male, and does not protect people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"), prohibits discrimination in health coverage and care. It bans discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, and disability in health programs and activities that receive federal funding. That these protections include transgender persons is supported by a rule adopted by HHS in 2016 and by most lower courts.

The Corrupt Trump Administration's repeal of the 2016 rule has been a long time coming, however; this is the fourth cartoon I've drawn in as many years about Severino and his determination to allow discrimination against LGBTQ patients and insurance consumers. "We're going back to the plain meaning of those terms, which is based on biological sex," Severino said in 2017, adding that the rule could save hospitals and insurers and others $2.9 billion over five years since they will be relieved of the requirement to print notices of nondiscrimination in several languages.

Under the new rule, a transgender person could, for example, be refused care for a checkup at a doctor's office, said Lindsey Dawson, associate director of HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. Other possible scenarios include a transgender man being denied treatment for ovarian cancer, or a hysterectomy not being covered by an insurer — or costing more when the procedure is related to someone's gender transition.

Whether this week's court decision will have any impact on Mr. Severino's new rules will depend on having another lawsuit work its way up to the Supremes. The National Center for Transgender Equality is putting on a brave front, but anything can happen. This week's cases turned on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which deals expressly with employment issues and specifically includes protections against sex discrimination. Health care falls under Title VI of the Act, which does not mention sex discrimination.

Will that be enough for Justices Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh to lasso Roberts and Gorsuch back to the right-wing corral? It is not as if any of them have a great deal of sympathy for Obamacare to begin with.

Q Toon: His True Colors

The Trump administration is expected to rescind Obama-era Health and Human Services department rules that have protected LGBTQ+ patients from discrimination in health care.

Due to a death in my family, I haven't been paying much attention to the news this week. Maybe those new pro-discrimination rules have come out, or they're waiting until Friday afternoon, or they still have to make sure they've included everybody the religious right wants on their shit list.

But with their moves to trash the environment, subsidize fossil fuels, wink and nod at corporate corruption, sanctify the Christian Reich, and build that damned ugly wall, the Trumpsters are definitely switching into high gear as if they know that time is running out.

Q Toon: The Beauty of the System

Last week, the Corrupt Trump Administration issued a new rule granting health care workers the right to do no weal if they can claim that patient care would impinge on their religious sensibilities.

Lambda Legal warns that, “The proposed rule also shields health care providers even if they refuse to give a referral after denying care, regardless of the consequences to the patient, and in violation of medical and ethical requirements and standards of care.”

The move is part of the right-wing Republican obsession to deny women control of their own bodies and to promote discrimination against LGBTQ people — transgender persons in particular. Except, of course, that it's not about us; it's about the poor, persecuted Christian majority.

Roger Severino, the director of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights, defended the new rule, saying it “does not create new substantive rights,” rather it “gives life and enforcement tools to existing federal conscience protections that have been on the books for decades.”
“We have not seen the hypotheticals that some have used to criticize the rule actually develop in real life,” he told NBC News in an email. “The beauty of the American system is that there are options for everyone. This rule promotes that principle by ensuring greater diversity in health care so that patients can continue to find doctors who match their values, and for example, OBGYNs are not excluded from the practice of medicine simply because they stand on the side of defending unborn human life.”

The rule protects not only doctors and nurses, but also pharmacists, insurance providers, and, yes, EMTs. Even if your doctor has no religious objection to prescribing your hormonal or immunotheraputic drugs, you may have to travel across the state to find a pharmacist willing to fill out your prescription.

And it's not as if insurance companies have any shortage of excuses for denying coverage already.

Pray that your premiums haven't been going to fund a company bought out by a cult of antivaxxer voodoo Scientologists.

Q Toon: Small Enough to Fit in Your Genes

You've probably heard by now that the Corrupt Trump Administration plans to issue an executive order decreeing that gender is an immutable characteristic decided in the womb. That is to say that the order will decree transgender individuals out of existence.

The New York Times learned of the ruling through a memo circulated in the Department of Human Services, home of the rabidly anti-lgbtq Roger Severino and the Religious Liberty University, er, Task Force. Should the proposal be approved by DHS, the Departments of Education, Justice and Labor are expected to follow suit.

This affects more than just telling transgender people to use the wrong bathroom. It could affect the kind of medical treatment transgender patients may receive under Medicaid (assuming there's anything left of Medicaid once Republicans are done with it), or which prisons transgender inmates might be sentenced to. It could even disenfranchise the whole lot of them by requiring them to try to vote using their dead names, if they can get past the poll worker convinced that Glen is trying to impersonate Glenda or vice versa.

Perhaps I'm being unfair linking this anti-transgender policy to Donald Berzilius Trump. It's of great interest to the theocrats in his administration — Severino, Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, and that ilk — but doesn't benefit Trump or his family personally.

On the other hand, it reverses a policy of the Obama administration, and Trump is more than eager to erase any vestige of his immediate predecessor, no matter what.

If Obama had built that wall across our southern border, Trump would be foaming at the mouth to tear it down.

Stacking the Triskaidekaitis

I first drew about the appointment of Roger Severino to the civil rights office of Health and Human Services last March. Severino, previously a lobbyist for the right-wing Heritage Foundation, has been an agitator against marriage equality and the treating transgender persons with any humanity or respect.

“On the basis of religious teachings, moral reasoning, scientific evidence, and medical experience, many have strong grounds to hold that one’s sex is an immutable characteristic,” Severino and a co-author wrote in a Heritage Foundation report in January 2016. “Many involved in providing medical care and those enrolled in health insurance plans have serious objections to participating in or paying for sex-reassignment surgeries or gender transitions.”

Last week, Severino announced the creation of a "Conscience and Religious Freedom Division" within his office

to ensure that health care providers are allowing workers to opt out of procedures when they have religious or moral objections. The new division would be a third, co-equal branch with the office's existing two divisions that focus on federal civil rights laws and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Severino and his Conscience and Religious Freedom ("Condom" for short) Division will come to the defense of America's beleaguered and persecuted Christian minority, ensuring that Christian health care workers will no longer be forced to violate their fundamental religious beliefs. No more will Baptist podiatrists be transferred to the Abortion Unit. Catholic pharmacists will no longer have to fill morning-after pill prescriptions for divorcees. Pentecostal dishwashers in the hospital cafeteria need not live in fear of transgender visitors asking them for directions to the ladies' room — wait, you say that's not the problem?

But longtime HHS officials say that the existing civil rights office was more than capable of handling these issues and that creating an entire division to focus on religious liberty sends the wrong message.
"This is a classic solution in search of a problem," said one official who's handled civil rights issues at HHS. "And it’s a problem that doesn’t really exist, because hospitals tend to be really compliant on this kind of stuff."
During the Obama administration, evangelical groups had even hailed HHS for its efforts to enforce religious freedom, such as intervening in a lawsuit filed by an anti-abortion nurse against Mount Sinai Health System in New York.

But if you thought my examples were silly, go back and read that excerpt from Severino's Heritage Foundation report again.

"[T]hose enrolled in health insurance plans have serious objections to ... paying for sex-reassignment surgeries or gender transitions"?

If you think about what Severino is saying there, it's that anyone paying for health insurance ought to have the right to object to somebody else's health care.

Just because your faith leads you to abstain from pork doesn't mean you have a right to stop your health insurance company from covering someone else's hospital visit for trichinosis.

You may have a religious commitment to pacifism, but you don't get to sue to get your premiums back if your insurance company pays for a veteran's PTSD treatment.

And if your god tells you to be vigilant against transgender cooties but your insurance company pays for the estrogen treatments of someone on the other side of town, tough. It's none of your damned business.

Q Toon: Rogerino Severino

As the wreckage of the Astronomical Health Costs Act smoldered in the foreground, Donald Joffrey Trump surreptitiously appointed anti-LGBT activist Roger Severino as head of Health and Human Services' Office of Civil Rights last week. While Devin Nunes's Russian clown act has diverted the attention of other cartoonists, I decided that Mr. Severino deserved a little notice.

Severino most recently served as director of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. There he focused on "religious liberty, marriage and life issues" at the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society. 

(Why, yes, the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society is where TrumpCorp. found Education Secretary Betsy Devos. But I digress.) ...

Severino has been vocal in his opinions about the civil rights of transgender people. He authored several reports speaking out against LGBT rights, including a 2016 report that criticized a proposed Obama administration rule to prevent discrimination against transgender patients within the healthcare system.
He's also authored multiple blog posts for the Daily Signal, where he consistently spoke out against White House provisions that protected LGBT groups from discrimination.

For example, in this Daily Signal post last year defending North Carolina's Bathroom Bill, Severino complained:

These developments prove that same-sex marriage was merely the start, not end, of the left’s LGBT agenda. The radical left is using government power to coerce everyone, including children, into pledging allegiance to a radical new gender ideology over and above their right to privacy, safety, and religious freedom.

For the Trump administration, whose EPA has declared war on the environment, whose health care reform sought to deprive people of health care, and whose education policy is to defund public schools, it should surprise nobody that they would turn Civil Rights over to the Christian Taliban.