To Your Health

It's that time of the month again! I've rummaged through my old cartoons from 40, 30, 20, and 10 years ago for today's Graphical History Tour.

UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., April 26, 1984

This 1984 cartoon starring Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, was probably the first one I drew of the AIDS crisis (not this one).

We still didn't know what was causing the terrible new disease that was apparently targeting otherwise healthy young gay men, Haitians, and patients who had received blood transfusions. Reagan had made no public comment about it, but sent out Heckler when there appeared to be some progress in identifying what would come to be known as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus.

Reagan was more occupied deflecting criticism of administration foreign policy by blaming that meddlesome Congress for reverses in the Middle East and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Secy. Heckler would later say that she had difficulty getting AIDS addressed in cabinet meetings during her tenure (1983-1985) and never discussed it with the President.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 18, 1994

Next stop: 1994, and I hope that leading off with that AIDS cartoon today properly set up the next one.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., March 31, 1994

Cutting down the nation's smoking habit was a major emphasis of President Bill Clinton's Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, who served in that position over the objection of tobacco-state politicians from September of 1993 to the last day of 1994.

You young whippersnappers may be shocked to know that thirty years ago, the air in offices, bars and restaurants — even, in some locales, hospital waiting rooms — was often thick with tobacco smoke. (Or perhaps you may not. I hear that vaping is getting to be as common among Gen Z as cigarettes used to be among Gen Emphysema.)

I vividly recall meeting up for Saturday morning breakfasts with my now husband at a local diner where the "non-smoking area" consisted of the booths along the walls. The tables in the center of the room were the "smoking area," meaning that every non-smoking table was right next to a smoking table. 

Which was okay. If you liked your breakfast tasting like it was cooked on an old ashtray.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, April 30, 2004

I found one cartoon from April of 2004 that fits more or less into today's theme of health and wellness. Hospital systems in southeast Wisconsin were (and still are) eagerly expanding into new communities, and the editorial board of the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee has often had something to say about their efforts.

In this case, there was friction between Aurora Hospitals and those of ProHealth Care as the former sought to open a facility in the city of Oconomowoc (which I won't tell you how to pronounce because that's a word we use to spot folks who ain't from around these parts) just west of Milwaukee County. ProHealth fended off Aurora's advances, more or less; Aurora instead built their new medical center in the adjacent village of Summit.

Pronounced SUM-mit.

for Q Syndicate, April 3, 2014

Leaping ten years ahead and half a world away, yet coming topically full circle, this last cartoon laments the woeful persecution in African countries of their LGBTQ+ citizens. In this case, Uganda and Nigeria.

Uganda had just passed a law that not only criminalized being gay or lesbian oneself, but also failing to report other LGBTQ+ persons to the authorities. My original blog post for this cartoon quoted a report in The Week explaining the law's effect on controlling HIV/AIDS in Africa:

"Uganda was once an AIDS success story, but that is now changing. The portion of the population that identifies as gay is tiny, but there are many more men in Uganda — and across Africa — who have sex with other men but do not identify as gay or bisexual. These men, many of them married, are now less likely to be honest with health-care providers and less likely to get the education, free condoms, and HIV testing they need. They are also more likely to contract the virus and spread it to their female and male partners. In Senegal, after several HIV prevention workers were imprisoned in 2008, the number of men seeking sexual health services in that area dropped sharply."

Likewise in Nigeria, as reported by Mother Jones, whose sources included John Adeniyi of the International Center for Advocacy on Rights to Health, an HIV intervention organization based in Abuja:

"Eight organizations that provide HIV treatment and prevention services in northern Nigeria have cut back on HIV outreach, training, and education programs, according to Dorothy Aken'Ova, executive director of Nigeria's International Center for Reproductive Health and Sexual Rights (INCRESE). 'People thought, "You know what? I don't want to be in prison because I'm providing treatment for these gay homosexual people,"' Adeniyi says. He expects more organizations will drop their programs in the coming months."

Uganda last year enacted an even more draconian "Death to Gays" law, literally mandating the death penalty for "aggravated" homosexuality. The law was upheld by the Ugandan Supreme Court earlier this month.

Nigerian military authorities continue mass arrests of LGBTQ+ citizens — 70 in one day last October. 

Just the same, it might be unfair to single out Uganda and Nigeria for criticism. Homosexual relations are illegal in 30+ of Africa's 54 countries.

And in Afghanistan, Antigua and Barbuda, Bangladesh, Barbados, Brunei, Comoros, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Indonesia, Iran, Jamaica, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Kiribati, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and, for all practical purposes, Russia and Belorus.

Q Toon: Spirit of St. Louis

The government of Israel has decided to deport some LGBT asylum seekers to Rwanda and Uganda, where they face likely persecution.

In Uganda, it’s illegal – “against the law of nature” – to be LGBT, and this may put the deported migrants in harm’s way.

In Rwanda, the legal situation is murkier but there are recorded instances of harassment, physical abuse and arbitrary arrests, said Shira Kupfer, adjunct professor and head of a program for LGBT refugees and asylum seekers coordinator by The Aguda – LGBT Task Force. 

“If you deport LGBT refugees to one of these countries, you’re putting them at danger to them, to their lives,” Kupfer told the Jerusalem Post. ...

 In an asylum application from 2016, an LGBT migrant said he was raped and assaulted in his country of origin because of his sexual orientation, Haaretz reported. 

In that case, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees recommended asylum, however, the Interior Ministry refused to grant refugee status.

This is not a case of antigay bias on Israel's part. Indeed, Israel's record on LGBT rights is head and shoulders above any of its neighbors. Moreover, Israel rejects 99% of asylum requests overall. In these cases, which actually involve refugees from Eritrea and Sudan rather than the countries to which Israel is sending them, the Israeli government claims that the asylum seekers are fleeing poverty and war, not antigay persecution.

Which just makes shipping them to countries where they will face antigay persecution all the more reprehensible.

✍

Drawing this week's cartoon, I wrestled with the problem of how much explanation of the MS St. Louis I needed to include. I can't include links to reference material in my cartoons (well, I could do that here on line, but hyperlinks don't work as well in print).

In some quarters, the story of the ship on which 900 German Jews attempted to flee Nazi persecution in 1939, only to be turned away from Havana, then Miami, forcing their return to Europe, is well known. But most Americans have never seen "Voyage of the Damned," let alone been taught about one of the darkest stains on U.S. immigration policy, pre-Trump.

Sailing so close to Florida that they could see the lights of Miami, some passengers on the St. Louis cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for refuge. Roosevelt never responded. The State Department and the White House had decided not to take extraordinary measures to permit the refugees to enter the United States. A State Department telegram sent to a passenger stated that the passengers must "await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States." ... 

Roosevelt was not alone in his reluctance to challenge the mood of the nation on the immigration issue. Three months before the St. Louis sailed, Congressional leaders in both US houses allowed to die in committee a bill sponsored by Senator Robert Wagner (D-N.Y.) and Representative Edith Rogers (R-Mass.). This bill would have admitted 20,000 Jewish children from Germany above the existing quota.

Happily, most of the St. Louis's passengers were able to disembark in England, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, but World War II would soon envelop most of the continent. Of the 532 passengers trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe, 254 would not survive the war.

Um Yah Yah

The reunion committee for my alma mater requested a drawing for this week's reunion booklet. I couldn't make the reunion myself, so you'll have to indulge me this Semesterback Saturday as I wallow in a bunch of personal nostalgia.

I had fun thinking up things to put together to make this drawing, although I did have to start all over once I recalled that while Kodak "110" cameras were yielding rectangular pictures since 1972, square photos were still quite common.

I tried to come up with things that might spark memories (while most of us still have them), so I included a "caf card" for a student with an implausibly Norwegian name. The Lion's Pause was a student-run coffee shop in the basement of Ytterboe Hall where student musicians would perform; students produced LP records of those groups in 1980 and 1981. Ytterboe Hall is gone now, in spite of student protests to "Keep Ytt Up," but there is a new Lion's Pause in Buntrock Commons.

There was the football game covered by ABC television, whose producers expected a marching band to perform during halftime. We didn't have a marching band per se, but St. Olaf is a musical school, so it wasn't difficult to pull one together. It even had a cellist.

A streaker ran through our graduation ceremony; the shorts we wore back then were almost as immodest. The "New Dorm" opened for residence in time for our senior year; it was later named for Sidney Rand, President of the College during our freshman through junior years. President Carter named Rand as Ambassador to Norway in 1980, sending Vice President Mondale to our campus to swear him in.

Back in my salad days, I cartooned for the campus newspaper, the Manitou Messenger. I've got one cartoon that shows a little bit of campus geography:

And one that betrays the fact that I had been in the utility tunnels underneath the campus, which was and presumably still is a no-no.

My freshman year cartoons tended to be pretty non-topical, but by my sophomore year, campus administrators began showing up in my cartoons fairly regularly, as well as a reincarnation of Rollin Kirby's prohibition-era "Mr. Dry" to represent the college alcohol policy. This one riffs on the limestone architecture of every 20th Century building on campus:

(Some older buildings, such as the women's gymnasium — converted to being the Speech-Theatre building before our freshman year but still smelling of chlorine — were painted gray to more closely resemble the limestone ones.)

And finally, a cartoon one of my Resident Assistants freshman year asked me to draw to cajole students selected to participate in a psych survey he and a classmate were doing. Mark (on the right) wanted the Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum motif, even though his partner didn't exactly have a roundish face. The dialogue is also theirs.

I have no word how their career trajectory has been, or how famous their psych study became, in the decades since.

Q Toon: Walk Together

Last week, the Anglican Communion -- the church that broke off from Roman Catholicism so that Henry VIII could divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn -- voted to punish its American outlet, the Episcopalian Church. "Global South" Anglicans, particularly those in former British colonies in Africa, have been eager to expel the Episcopalian Church for its acceptance of marriage equality for same-sex couples (and for allowing an openly gay man to serve as bishop).

Nigeria alone has more Anglicans than the U.S., Canada and Great Britain combined. When Anglican leaders from the global South insisted on punishing the U.S. church for same-sex marriage, they had the votes to get most of what they wanted. A joint statement said U.S. church's policy on same-sex marriage represented a fundamental departure from the faith and teaching held by the majority of the Anglican provinces.

The punishment, shutting the American church out of doctrinal meetings of the Anglican Communion for the next three years, was not enough for the Ugandan Primate, Archbishop Stanley Ntagali, who stalked out of the meeting. Ntagali had been pushing for a stronger resolution calling upon the American and Canadian churches to "voluntarily withdraw from the meeting and other Anglican Communion activities until they repented of their decisions that have torn the fabric of the Anglican Communion at its deepest level."

After the vote, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, issued a statement attempting to mitigate the schism.  “It’s a constant source of deep sadness that people are persecuted for their sexuality," he wrote. "I want to take this opportunity personally to say how sorry I am for the hurt and pain, in the past and present, that the church has caused and the love that we at times completely failed to show, and still do, in many parts of the world including in this country.”

As for the still divided church, Welby hopes that the primates will continue to "walk together," a phrase taken from Amos 3:3: "Can two walk together, except they be agreed?" (KJV)

The feelings of LGBT Christians aside, Giles Fraser in The Guardian takes a look at the bright side:

For three years the American church will be banned from various doctrinal and ecumenical meetings of the communion. Given that such meetings are about as interesting at watching paint dry, one might conclude that the Americans have been rewarded rather than punished.

Q Toon: Proportional Response

Usually, I try not to draw about the same topic two weeks in a row, but some stories just stick to the news like gum to a shoe.

Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) made news a couple weeks ago when he penned a letter to Iran lecturing them that the U.S. Senate would have to ratify whatever treaty the Obama administration and the European Union worked out with them, broadly hinting that of course, it won't. He was on CNN's Situation Room to discuss his strategy to blitzkrieg Iran into submission when host Wolf Blitzer asked him about the so-called "religious liberty" bill that Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson had sent back to the state legislature after the furor over Indiana's RLPA.

Apparently eager to steer the conversation back to his Iran talking points, Cotton pooh-poohed LGBT concerns about religious liberties legislation:

“I also think it’s important that we have a sense of perspective about our priorities. In Iran they hang you for the crime of being gay. ...”

Q Syndicate✒Apr 9, 2015

Of course, gays' and lesbians' lives and liberties are threatened in many other countries besides Iran -- in some cases at the urging of American activists who purport to be Christians.

I should note here that Cotton did in fact acknowledge that Christians don't have it easy in Iran, either, continuing,

“They’re currently imprisoning an American preacher for spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ in Iran. We should focus on the most important priorities our country faces right now, and I would say that a nuclear armed Iran, given the threat that it poses to the region and to our interests in the region and American citizens, is the most important thing that we’d be focused on.”

Cotton was not, however, suggesting that the plight of that American preacher (or, indeed, of the 150 Christian students slaughtered at Garissa University College in Kenya -- or the 14 killed in the Lahore, Pakistan, church bombing; or the 21 Copts beheaded in Libya;  or in Nigeria; or in Syria... ) was comparable to the gross human rights tragedy of having to play piano for a gay wedding.

That's the Last Time I Send Money to a Nigerian Prince!

The new antigay laws in Uganda and Nigeria go beyond criminalizing homosexuals:

"The [Ugandan] law also makes it a crime to fail to report anyone who breaks the law, essentially ensuring that gays will need to live secret lives. The law even makes illegal the 'promotion' and 'recognition' of homosexual relations, including by any government entity or nongovernmental organization inside or outside Uganda. And for the first time, the law targets lesbians."

HIV/AIDS in Africa is not a disease confined to the gay community, but the disease is widely blamed on gays nevertheless. Since failure to report homosexuals to the authorities is now criminal, consider this from The Week's "Everything You Need to Know about Africa's Antigay Crackdown"

"Uganda was once an AIDS success story, but that is now changing. The portion of the population that identifies as gay is tiny, but there are many more men in Uganda — and across Africa — who have sex with other men but do not identify as gay or bisexual. These men, many of them married, are now less likely to be honest with health-care providers and less likely to get the education, free condoms, and HIV testing they need. They are also more likely to contract the virus and spread it to their female and male partners. In Senegal, after several HIV prevention workers were imprisoned in 2008, the number of men seeking sexual health services in that area dropped sharply." 

And in Nigeria:

"[John ]Adeniyi [a human rights program officer at the International Center for Advocacy on Rights to Health, an HIV intervention organization based in Abuja] estimates that since the law took effect in January, the number of patients coming into ICARH for HIV treatment has dropped by over 50 percent. 'One person told me he would rather die…than come to the organization' and risk imprisonment, he says. He adds that LGBT couples living with HIV may also be discouraged from going to the doctor for couples counseling, out of fear that the doctor may turn them over to the police.

"Eight organizations that provide HIV treatment and prevention services in northern Nigeria have cut back on HIV outreach, training, and education programs, according to Dorothy Aken'Ova, executive director of Nigeria's International Center for Reproductive Health and Sexual Rights (INCRESE). 'People thought, "You know what? I don't want to be in prison because I'm providing treatment for these gay homosexual people,"' Adeniyi says. He expects more organizations will drop their programs in the coming months."

Q Toon: African Øueen

Welcome to another episode of old-timey movie reference theatre at Bergetoons. We haven't seen any new movies in almost a year at our household, so my inspiration has to come from Turner Classic Movies and NCIS reruns. This one's kind of a stretch, given that I've migrated Rose and Sam Sayer's nationality from Great Britain to the U.S.; but even given that this isn't the best caricature of Katharine Hepburn of all time, I guess it's still more recognizable than a reference to "Mogambo" would have been.

As America's religious homophobes have recently lost ground in their culture war against gays and lesbians, some have seized upon Africa as their new Promised Land (see Roger Ross Williams's "God Loves Uganda"). So-called evangelists such as Scott Lively have lobbied African governments such as Nigeria and Uganda to pass draconian laws criminalizing LGBT advocacy and association -- even holding hands in public, or running a business that caters to gays and lesbians. This new overkill comes even though homosexual sex itself was already illegal in these and 29 other sub-Saharan countries. (Not that super-Saharan governments are any friendlier, mind you.)

Q Toon: And the Rest

Paul Berge Q Syndicate-Mar 13, 2013 EditorialCartoonists.com

For its first season of "Gilligan's Island," the show opened with a catchy little sea ditty as its theme song, which told the story of how the castaways got to the island, then introduced the characters in its third verse:

"With Gilligan,

The Skipper, too;

The Millionaire

And his wife;

The movie star

And the rest."

There were only two other characters in the regular cast, but it wasn't until the second season that the writers crammed "The Professor and Mary Ann" into the last line (leaving, I suppose, the radio announcer as the last regular cast member out in the cold.)

This month, the British Commonwealth produced a "Charter for the 21st Century" proclaiming broad support for human rights, which states, "We are implacably opposed to all forms of  discrimination, whether rooted  in gender, race, colour, creed, political belief or other grounds." The London Daily Mail asserted that "other grounds" is meant to refer to gays, lesbians, transgender and bisexual persons.

Not everyone is impressed, however. British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell points out that:

"More than 40 of the 54 Commonwealth countries still criminalise homosexuality, mostly under laws imposed by Britain during the colonial era. Six of these countries stipulate life imprisonment. Uganda is currently considering legislation that would introduce the death penalty for repeat gay offenders. The Nigerian parliament has before it a similarly draconian anti-gay bill that will outlaw same-sex marriage, and LGBT organisations and advocacy. The Commonwealth's response to these two bills - and to the homophobic witch-hunts in Cameroon - has been feeble."

Homosexuality is still a flogging offense in Pakistan; in Jamaica, anyone convicted of the "abominable crime of buggery" faces up to 10 years' imprisonment, with or without hard labor; Nigerian punishment already includes death by stoning as a possible punishment. (Wikipedia has a page devoted to LGBT rights in all countries of the world -- worth checking before booking that Caribbean vacation.)

The difference between the British Commonwealth and Gilligan's Island is that there were only seven castaways on the TV show. There wasn't any question who "and the rest" were.

Q Toon: The Life of Lambda

Drawing this cartoon, it occurred to me that there are such things as Siberian tigers, so I could have put tigers in both boats. I stayed with my original idea of using a bear, which is, after all, the cartoon shorthand for Russia.

And in trying to find a picture of a tiger from the angle I wanted, I was somewhat surprised to learn that there is no real difference between African tigers and Bengal tigers. I guess I had assumed that, as with elephants, there would be something to distinguish one from the other -- more stripes, a longer snout, tufted ears, or that sort of thing.

I did squeeze in one change along the way. The original proposal to my editors called for the word "death" to be crossed out on the tiger's label, with "life in prison" squeezed in, due to claims by the Ugandan bill's sponsors that the death penalty has been removed from it. More recent reports, however, are that the death penalty remains in the bill, so I shoehorned "death" back into the label.

"The only version of the bill that is public today still includes the death penalty provision for 'aggravated homosexuality'" said Kasha Jacqueline, Executive Director of Freedom and Roam Uganda (FARUG). "We know that the bill still refers to death, contrary to what the media [are] saying."

The Russian bill doesn't include a death penalty, but the proposed ban on "homosexual propaganda" recalls the Soviet-era ban on homosexuality:

Igor Kochetkov, head of the LGBT Network, a Russian gay rights group, [said,] "It's a strange coincidence that this law will be looked at on 19 December, and on 17 December 1933, the Soviet authorities made sexual relations between men illegal. They argued that gays were alien to Soviet society. Now and then, we hear the same rhetoric."

_____
Update: It  has been brought to my attention that tigers are not native to Africa at all. Which would explain why there wouldn't be any way to distinguish between African and Bengal tigers.

The Ugandan "Death to Gays" Bill

American evangelists have been working hard with their counterparts in the central African nation of Uganda to create the sort of theocracy that pesky liberals in the United States won't let them establish here. Ugandan officials, faced with an AIDS crisis that, percentage-wise, dwarfs America's, are only too happy to scapegoat homosexuals.

Hence a proposed law that calls for life in prison for anyone found guilty of engaging in homosexual activity, and capital punishment for those who are HIV-positive. Anyone who fails to report gays and lesbians to the authorities would also face imprisonment.

At first, Americans who have pushed their influence in Uganda, such as Pastor Rick Warren, Senator Chuck Grassley, "Ex-Gay Therapy" quacks, and others in the Governmental-Evangelical complex, were silent on the bill, or sloughed it off as Uganda's internal business. Under pressure, however, more of Uganda's friends are deciding that they can't reconcile "Love the sinner, hate the sin" with "Arbeit Macht Frei." Find more on this topic at Qweerty, the Rachel Maddow show, and other sites.
One word about this cartoon: As with any topic involving non-Caucasians, I had to be sensitive to perceptions of racism in drawing this cartoon -- in this case, especially because the Big Evil Bad Guy in the cartoon had to be black. It wouldn't have made any sense to make him white. In another time, most cartoons would have depicted him as a black-as-coal jungle savage, wielding shrunken heads instead of an axe.

My choice to dress him as a medieval European executioner was in part to avoid such a racist depiction, but also to convey the sense that he was acting in an official capacity, which wouldn't come across if he were a savage out of a 1940's movie or Charles Addams cartoon.

It also made sense to me for the "Joe Public" character at lower right also to be African. I also decided to make her a woman, which was a 50-50 consideration. My first efforts had her wearing a woolen headdress based on one worn by a woman in the very same issue of Time magazine with the pictures of Rick Warren I used for reference; but it was impossible to tell from the resulting sketches that I wasn't drawing her with wild hair. Thus the wrap she is wearing in the final product, modeled after one on a different woman from a different country in a different issue of Time. I beg your indulgence if it should happen that neither headdress is typical of Ugandan women.