Q Toon: Listen Graciously Before Talking

In spite of yesterday's cartoon looking forward to April Fools' Day, I'm not quite done with St. Patrick's Day issues.

Having Irish Prime Ministers over here in the U.S. for St. Patrick's Day is a tradition now; I guess there's not so much demand for them to be in Ireland for the holiday. They usually get to be marshal of an American St. Paddy's Day parade, then to pay a courtesy call on the Vice President.

Generally, this is done the morning before the Taoiseach meets the US President in the Oval Office.
Breaking from tradition this year, Varadkar will attend the vice president’s residence on Friday morning, the day after meeting Donald Trump in the White House.

The media were allowed in to document last year's meeting between Mike Pence and then-P.M. Enda Kenny, but were shut out of this year's tête-à-tête with current Teoiseach Leo Varadkar.

As reported by the Indianapolis Star, having the meeting closed to the press was at the Vice President's request.

Pence, who is of Irish descent, and his wife, Karen, spoke to the media at last year's festivities, where Pence expressed his excitement over being able to invite a "special guest to the White House" —  in reference to Kenny.
But it's different this year — and Varadkar's comments in recent days to the media may be a reason why.
When asked whether he would talk to Pence about the vice president's stance on gay-conversion therapy, Varadkar told an Irish publication, TheJournal.ie, on Wednesday that if given the chance he would talk about "the wider issue" of gay rights. 

As I noted the other day, Varadkar is Ireland's first openly gay Teoiseach, as well as its first of Indian descent, and, at 38 when elected, the youngest to hold the title. (There have been younger Prime Ministers, but a "Teoiseach" is chief executive and head of government in addition to being P.M. Besides the Teoiseach, there's also a President of Ireland, who is the head of state, which is about as confusing to us eachtrannaigh as the pronunciation of "teoiseach" is.)

While serving in Kenny's cabinet as Minister for Health, however, Varadkar told RTÉ Radio, "I'm not a half-Indian politician, or a doctor politician or a gay politician for that matter. It's just part of who I am; it doesn't define me; it is part of my character, I suppose."

The media were present for Varadkar's Thursday meeting with Mercurial U.S. President Donald Trump, and at a luncheon with congressional leaders. At those events, trade, taxes, immigration and Guinness defined the main topics of conversation. He must have exhausted other parts of his character during the conclave with Mr. Pence.

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I had about three quarters of this cartoon inked, including the arm wearing Pence's watch, when John Oliver started talking about his and the Vice President's new books about the Second Bunny on Last Week Tonight. Happily, the pose already drawn accommodated the addition of a rabbit; and there was still time to change the dialogue balloon that was to have said "Leprechauns' Golden Buried Treasure."

Q Toon: Parade Downgrade

The LGBTQAIXYZ community's fight to be included in St. Patrick's Day parades goes back longer than that unwieldy acronym does. For the most part, we seem to have worn down the resistance.

But not everywhere. Organizers of the Staten Island march barred the island's Pride Center from their parade last week, reportedly adding that even the Prime Minister of Ireland, Leo Varadkar (who is openly gay) would not be allowed in their event if he displayed any "visual association with LGBT identity."

So let's just posit that the Staten Island parade is not among "all of the best St. Patrick's Day parades."

In Dublin, Galway, Cork and other Irish cities, gay and lesbian groups march in St. Patrick’s Day events without incident. Chicago, which has a large Irish Catholic population, has allowed gay groups since the mid-1990s. “Our city realized a long time ago that we have so much more in common than apart,” says Tom Tunney, Chicago’s first openly gay alderman. “We’re a city of cultures, and the LGBT community is a part of it.”

Boston's St. Pat's organizers allowed an LGBTQ group to parade with them in 2014, 2015, and 2016, only to ban them again last year. But after the resulting backlash, they are letting the LGBTQ marchers back in this year.

New York's Fifth Street parade banned LGBTQ participation until 2015, when they granted a permit to Out@NBCUniversal, the LGBTQ resource group of the network televising their parade. They were joined by the Lavender and Green Alliance the following year, thanks to pressure from Guinness, Sam Adams and Heineken. (And from Mayor DiBlasio, too, but I don't need to tell you whether beer or a politician is more important to St. Patrick's Day festivities.)

Now, I don't know for sure that, if mercurial American President Trump's dream of tanks and missiles parading down Pennsylvania Avenue comes to fruition, there won't be some group of LGBTQ soldiers or veterans demanding a float of their own.

I wasn't really privy to the last Homosexual Agenda Steering Cabal meeting. And if I were, I couldn't tell you.

The Empire Strikes Back

I usually save this sort of thing for Saturday, but I have something else planned for tomorrow.

The Advocate, April 29, 1916

I did want to follow up on last week's Slainteback Sathairn, however, and today is the centennial of the quashing of the Easter Rising in Ireland. Above is the front page of the April 29, 1916 Advocate, a weekly newspaper of the Irish in New York City, still reporting "Rebellion Spreading in Ireland."

The Chicago Daily Tribune, April 27, 1916

In keeping with this blog's gay slant, here's the LGBT connection with the Easter Rising. Sir Roger Casement, an Irish sympathizer, was captured by British forces during the failed attempt to ship guns from Germany to the Irish rebels.

Casement had worked with Henry Stanley (the guy famous for saying "Dr. Livingston, I presume") in the Congo (Zaire). He documented human rights abuses, up to and including murder, by the private army created in the Congo by Belgian King Leopold II to force the locals to work in the King's rubber plantations. He investigated similar abuses in Peru of the Putumayo Indians, and was knighted by the British crown in 1911 for his efforts.

Retiring from the British consular service in 1913, Casement was a founder of the Irish Volunteers, and met with German diplomats at the outbreak of World War I to funnel German arms to Ireland. 900 Mauser rifles made it to the rebels in July, 1914, but the British were able to intercept the April, 1916 shipment and sink the ship.

Suffering from malaria, a disease he was never able to completely shake from his days in the Congo, Casement was arrested in County Kerry and imprisoned in the Tower of London. A petition urging clemency was circulated by such luminaries of the time as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Bernard Shaw; to counter this, the British released Casement's "Black Diaries," detailing a series of sexual encounters with young men in 1903, 1910 and 1911.

Whether genuine or forged, the Black Diaries essentially quashed support for Casement among Irish and American Catholics. Casement was convicted of treason, stripped of his knighthood, and hanged on August 3, 1916. Ireland now has a military airfield named in Casement's honor, even though he wouldn't have been allowed to march in the Ancient Order of Hibernians St. Patrick's Day Parade until very recently.

The Duluth Herald, April 29, 1916

In closing, here's the May 5 edition of The Advocate. You can embiggen these images all you want, but the resolution of my original source wasn't good enough to read the copy anyway.

The Advocate, May 5, 1916

Hillary Clinton: HRC in NYC

For today's episode of Statenback Saturday, I dredge up some more of my old cartoons about Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Last week, I posted some cartoons dating from her First Ladyship, and the Sandersnistas among my readers might be forgiven if they criticized me for a pro-Hillary bias. Today's cartoons date from her tenure as the U.S. Senator from the state of New York and were drawn for an LGBT audience -- and posting them again is probably not doing her any favors. (Especially since they criticize her for stuff which somehow failed to make this comprehensive list of all the terrible things she has done.)

Hillary Clinton chose to run for New York's open Senate seat because New York, having many citizens who are from somewhere else, have a history of electing public officials who are from somewhere else, too. Those citizens can be mighty proud of being from somewhere else, or at least that their great-grandparents were from somewhere else. There are also those who are from somewhere else because they aren't accepted for who they are somewhere else, and by golly, now they are proud of how far they've come.

Senator Clinton probably wished she had stayed somewhere else during the collision of ethnic pride and gay pride that New York enjoys every St. Patrick's Day. Running for the senate seat in 2000, she had marched in both the New York City Ancient Order of Hibernians parade, which banned LGBT participation, and also in an earlier "St. Pat's For All" parade in Queens, created as a gay-friendly alternative. Her attempt to please everybody placated nobody.

She skirted the controversy in 2001 by marching in Syracuse's parade upstate instead.

The St. Patrick's Day Parade issue had still not gone away when she was preparing to launch her 2008 presidential campaign.

But there were more substantive LGBT issues on her plate, too, such as Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and marriage equality. My only cartoon depicting her efforts to distance herself from DADT  was when she was running for the Senate in 2000. As for marriage equality, a window of opportunity opened in California in 2008, but neither she nor her rival for the Democratic nomination were inclined to lead on the issue.

I'm skipping right past her tenure at the State Department now, but both Mrs. Clinton and President Obama did come around, eventually.

Parading with Pride

Welcome once again to Swashbuckleback Saturday. June is LGBT Pride Month, so I've dug up one of my cartoons from 1999.

Nowadays, the Religious Right has been seeking Special Rights to avoid having to do business with lesbian and gay consumers, but back at the end of the 20th Century, some Religious Rightwingers had hit upon the idea that LGBT Pride Parades should be forced to allow them and their antigay bullhorns to participate.

They were reacting in part to LGBT groups that had agitated to be allowed to march in St. Patrick's Day parades. That agitation, however, had already resulted in the Supreme Court ruling in favor of the right of parade organizers to exclude groups they disagreed with. Justice David Souter, writing for a unanimous court in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, & Bisexual Group of Boston (1995), said, "One important manifestation of the principle of free speech is that one who chooses to speak may also decide what not to say."

By the way, "MCC" refers to Metropolitan Community Churches, a protestant denomination founded by gay pastor Rev. Troy Perry in 1968.

Q Toon: Irish Ayes

Over the weekend, Irish voters overwhelmingly approved granting gay and lesbian couples the same right to marry that heterosexual couples enjoy. Which you already knew, if for no other reason than you read the fake newspaper headline at left.

We cartoonists put these fake newspapers in our cartoons because we can't trust that every reader will have knowledge of the story we are commenting on, or that they will connect the cartoon to it. These newspaper headlines require figuring out some way to compose the cartoon so that it doesn't look out of place to have a newspaper prominently displayed where the reader can read it.

But they do come in handy, because the Irish vote might have been overshadowed by the subsequent vote of the Greenland Parliament in favor of marriage equality. It's so easy to confuse Ireland and Greenland, you know; them both being Atlantic islands and into the color green and so forth.

So, now that I'm quite certain that you have indeed read the headline and located Ireland on a map, here's the cartoon.

Paul Berge Q Syndicate✒May 28, 2015 EditorialCartoonists.com

This year, the New York chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians begrudged the LGBT employees of NBC-Universal to march in its St. Patrick's Day parade, if only at the insistence of NBC, which televises the parade. Before then, the AOH forbade any LGBT group from its parade, ever since the hostile reception to them (and then-Mayor David Dinkins marching with them) in 1991.

Greenlander-Americans, so far as I know, have never barred LGBTs from marching in their parades. Ullortuneq is coming up on June 21, and I expect to see a healthy representation of out and proud Greenlanders marching in cities all across these United States.

Q Toon: It's a Darlin, Darlin Day

Because everyone gets to be a little bit Irish today, here's a cartoon from 2003 wearin' the green.

Faith, an' have a safe an' happy St. Paddy's Day!

Q Toon: St. Patrick's Day Off

Nearly every March for years and years, I've drawn something about St. Patrick's Day parades, always about the one in New York. I'm happy to announce that this year, I'm doing something different.

Q Syndicate✥Mar 5, 2015

Immaculate Heart of Mary School, a small Catholic school in Harvard, Massachusetts, has announced that it is canceling its participation in Boston's St. Patrick's Day parade because parade organizers, the Allied War Veterans' Council, are permitting OutVets, an organization of LGBT military veterans, to march.

"We can't associate with that,” Brother Thomas Dalton, principal of Immaculate Heart of Mary School, said in a phone interview. "It would appear we were condoning it."

In the past, parade organizers have excluded LGBT groups from the parade, citing antigay Catholic religious dogma; but last year, the beer companies who are the major sponsors of the parade withdrew their support because of the policy.

The thing that gets me about Brother Dalton is that it's not as if his marching band is being required to follow directly after RuPaul's Drag Race, Topless Dykes on Bikes, Twinks Wearing Little More Than Glitter, or 50 Shades of Latex. It's a veterans' group, fer crying out loud -- men and women who have served our country and lived to tell about it -- who might not even have staged anywhere near the Immaculate Mary Marching Band for all we know.

Given the 100" (2.5 m) of snow Boston is dealing with this winter, one wonders how organizers plan to march anyone down the snowbound streets of Southie anyway. One imagines spectators clinging to the tops of plow berms high above the parade as it is forced to march no more than three abreast down the constricted streets.

They might have to postpone the parade until Mothers' Day.

Q Toon: Sure 'Tis Like a Morn in September

New York LGBT organizations are less than impressed by the decision by the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) to allow Out@NBCUniversal to march in New York's St. Patrick's Day Parade next March. Out@NBCUniversal is the LGBT employee group for the media corporation broadcasting coverage of the parade, and will be the only LGBT group allowed to participate.

The last time an LGBT group marched in the parade, in 1991 (also, briefly and without permission, in 1992), it did not go very well at all. Since then, the AOH had refused to allow any LGBT  group to march in the parade until now.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I can't top Steve Benson's cartoon from last Friday, or Lena Dunham's tweet, or Howard Stern's eulogy.

Nor do I wish to pile on with yet another cartoon depicting Joan Rivers at the Pearly Gates castigating St. Peter for wearing white after Labor Day. As many others have observed, it's kind of lazy to commemorate a Jewish person that way. (On the other hand, cartoonists haven't come up with a recognizable image for being taken into the bosom of Abraham.)

So instead, I'm going for brach.

Great Minds Think Alike

And small minds seldom differ.

Joe Jervis linked to this April Fools Day story from Irish Central yesterday:

"President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has been invited to become Grand Marshal of the 2015 NYC St. Patrick's Day parade.
"According to a press release published on its homepage by parade committee, the committee has personally written to the Russian president to invite him to become the parade's Grand Marshal in 2015.
"The historic invite will silence longtime critics who say the parade is not inclusive, Dunleavy said. "A Russian citizen has never been selected to become Grand Marshal before, never mind an elected head of state," A spokesman explained. ...

"Reaction from LGBT groups, who have long been excluded from the parade, was swift.
"'The world should take note,' said Stephen Kennedy of GLAAD. 'This committee will literally go as far as the Kremlin to insult LGBT New Yorkers.'"

Where have I seen that idea before? Just sayin'.

What gets me, actually, are the commenters at both sites who seem to have been suckered by this story.

Q Toon: Slava Erin!

A while ago, metapicture.com posted a list of handy hints for recognizing artists' work. "If the paintings have tons of little people in them but otherwise seem normal," it counsels, it's Pieter Breugel the Elder. So perhaps this week's cartoon is something that Old Daddy Breugel would paint. And, incidentally, "Pa Breugel" is an anagram for my name; I've been known to sign April Fool's cartoons with that moniker.

I usually don't like drawing cartoons dominated by buildings, with tiny, tiny people too small to have their faces showing. The whole time I was drawing this cartoon, I was dreading the possibly more arduous task of colorizing it. Ultimately, I decided that nearly everyone in this crowd would wear green, which saved some time.

But I enjoy caricature much more than architecture, so I'm disappointed that there really aren't any faces to speak of this week. If there were, the cartoon might be mistaken for a painting by Jan Van Eyck.