Saturday at the Party with George

"To Be Alone — Be Great" by Hal Coffman for International Features Service, Feb. 22, 1925

If Hal Coffman's cartoon strikes you as an odd way to commemorate George Washington's birthday, yes, it is. 

So before anyone gets any bright ideas about including Napoleon Bonaparte in Felonious Trump’s Garden of Heroes, let me explain. 

February 22, 1925 fell on a Sunday, and in those days, the front page of the Sunday editorial section in every Hearst newspaper was topped by a cartoon illustration stretching all the way across the page illustrating a lengthy editorial-cum-sermon from corporate headquarters. Coffman's cartoon accompanied an essay that argued that Napoleon Bonaparte, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln were all great-minded men, but that Napoleon lacked the modesty of the Americans and thus overstepped the limits of leadership.

Napoleon also differed from Washington and Lincoln by having his birthday in August.

"Where're You Going, Cal" by Wm. A. Ceperley in Davenport Democrat, Feb. 22, 1925

Washington's birthday is usually a time to compare and contrast our first President with the current occupant of the office. The comparison pretty much always favors Mr. Washington, although I fully expect today's Brancos and Varvels to echo Mr. Trump's egomaniacal self-aggrandizement.

Returning to 1925, I didn't run across any other editorial cartoonists joining William Ceperley in trash-drawing President Coolidge.

"The Cherry Tree Moral" by Jesse Taylor Cargill in Sacramento Bee, Feb. 21, 1925

The editorial cartoonists' go-to George Washington reference has long been the entirely apocryphal tale of not lying about chopping down his father's cherry tree. Drawing Washington saying "I cannot tell a lie" and a modern-day politician responding "I cannot tell the truth" dates at least as far back as the Nixon administration; subsequent cartoonists have added later presidents chiming in "I cannot tell the difference."

I'll bet there are a bunch of such cartoons today to balance the Varvels and Brancos.

"Washington, D.C. and the Cherry Tree" by Edward Gale in Los Angeles Times, Feb. 22, 1925

Speaking of whom, is this where they get their ideas?

"It's Strange How It Keeps On Sprouting After All These Years" by Carey Orr in Chicago Tribune, Feb. 22, 1925

I found it interesting that several cartoonists in 1925 pictured chopping down the cherry tree in a positive light. Carey Orr at the vociferously isolationist Chicago Tribune laments the "foreign entanglements" that kept sprouting from the stump of "foreign alliances."

Everything old is new again again.

"The Cherry Tree Incident Up to Date" by T.E. Powers for Star Feature Syndicate, ca. Feb. 23, 1925

Continuing the motif of Everybody Hates Cherry Trees, T.E. Powers, whose modus operandi was to present readers with multiple choice of cartoons each day,  tosses in a couple other classic George Washington references besides the Cherry Tree Incident. If one idea didn't appeal to the reader, perhaps another one would.

The bottom two panels refer to President Coolidge getting the cabinet picks for his own full term through Congress (the Republican majority presented few obstacles, although there would be resistance to Coolidge's nominee for Attorney General), and a contemporary complaint that leftists wielded too much influence in children's education. 

"George W. Legislature" by Tom Foley in Minneapolis Daily Star, Feb. 23, 1925

Tom Foley used the cherry tree analogy to twit his Minnesota legislature for accomplishing so little "needed legislation."

That can't be a cherry tree, however. I don't think they are able to grow anywhere near that big.

"Hacking Away at It" by Grover Page in Louisville Courier-Journal, Feb. 22, 1925

That didn't stop Grover Page from drawing this cartoon, even while viewing the damage to his tree very differently than Tom Foley did his. What a relief to find a cartoon in which the tree didn't deserve to be chopped down!

It's not clear to me whether Page was arguing again against the proposed Child Labor Amendment to the Constitution (see here), or some other issue. Certainly the Eighteenth Amendment had been the work of "professional reformers"; but he might have wanted to depict more damage to the tree from an already ratified amendment.

"Why the Family didn't Get the Radio Program" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Feb. 21, 1925

So not all the editorial cartoonists reached for political topics that Sunday.

I have not discovered what specific radio program Dorman Smith might have had in mind when he drew the above cartoon. Coolidge's inauguration would be broadcast live on March 4, the first live broadcast of a presidential inauguration; but of course, that hadn't happened just yet.

According to a survey by the Sears-Roebuck Agricultural Broadcasting Stations WLS (Chicago) reported in the February 19, 1925 Indianapolis News, 33% of respondents listened to broadcast radio regularly. The most popular programs were classical music, followed closely by vocal music. After that came farm and home programs — not surprisingly, considering the survey base — and bringing up the rear, dramas, readings, and — again, no surprise — political speeches. 

"Not Skeptical But" by Chas Kuhn in Indianapolis News, Feb. 21, 1925

I don't know how common the practice was in 1925 of reading books by tossing them onto a nearby carpet. The fellow in Charles Kuhn's cartoon may have been far-sighted, I suppose.

In any case, the font of the book's text was large enough for Kuhn's readers to make out; but in case it's too small for you, it says "Washington never told a lie." 

"How Proud He Must Be of Some of His Children" by William Hanny in Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 22, 1925

I don't know what it is that editorial cartoonists of 1925 had against crossword puzzles, but virtually all of them kept throwing shade at them.

Q Toon: AG Stands for Almira Gulch

Impeached Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton isn't going to let a little thing like his state's borders stop him from going after transgender kids and their families.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is requesting medical records of Texas youth who have received gender-affirming care from a Georgia telehealth clinic, marking at least the second time he’s sought such records from providers in another state.

The clinic, QueerMed, confirmed on Friday morning that they received the request. QueerMed said it stopped servicing youth in Texas after the state banned transition-related care last year. The clinic’s founder said the attorney general requested information about patients dating back to Jan. 1, 2022, before the ban took effect.

The clinic said that Paxton asked for private information about Texas residents who were provided with telehealth care in Texas before the ban, and residents provided with care outside of Texas after the ban. The request, they said, nearly mirrors one the attorney general sent to Seattle Children’s Hospital last year.

Paxton asked Seattle Children’s for a variety of patient information, including the number of Texas children they have treated, medications prescribed to children, the children’s diagnoses and the name of Texas laboratories where tests for youth are administered.

In response to that request, known as a civil investigative demand, Seattle Children’s sued the Texas Office of the Attorney General in December.

QueerMed confirmed that Paxton sent his request to them on Nov. 17, the same day that Seattle Children’s received the similar demand for documents. QueerMed received the request Dec. 7, due to mail delays. Its receipt of the letter was first reported by The Houston Chronicle on Friday morning.

I'm going to level with you here: I'm mighty sick and tired of having to come up with new things to say about Republicans' psychotic vendetta against transgender citizens. You think you're tired of hearing about Taylor Swift showing up at every Kansas City Chiefs game? Puh-leeze. Republicans launched this crusade over a decade ago, and now it's everywhere you look.

They started by frightening their impressionable minions with fanciful tales of hairy, brutish men in dresses lurking in women's bathrooms. Then they moved on to keeping transgender girls out of locker rooms, out of pools, out of sports. Now they're attacking transgender people's rights to vote, to work, to drive, to cross state lines, to be called by their own names. Above all, they keep passing laws to criminalize transgender persons' health care.

And yet it's those whiny MAGA snowflakes who think they're the ones someone is trying to "erase."

Keep the Dents in Presidents' Day

Hey, kids! Let's get our Presidents' Day holiday weekend off to a roaring start with some 100-year-old cartoons celebrating the Father Of Our Country!

"Washington Still Lives" by Robert L. Ripley in New York Globe, Feb. 22, 1922

If Washington still lives, someone had better tell Uncle Sam. Because I don't think he's still decorating for Christmas.

And yes, that cartoonist is the Ripley of "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" fame. "Believe It Or Not" started out as an occasional diversion from Ripley's sports cartoons for the New York Globe; this tribute to George Washington is another.

"February 22, 1922" by Clifford Berryman for Evening Star, Washington DC, February 22, 1922

Hanging a sketch of our first president where it blocks Uncle Sam's view of the seas ahead doesn't seem to me to be the brightest idea in the world; but as long as Captain Sam can see the horizon, I guess that's where anything that might be in the way is likely to turn up. 

It might be a nuisance when trying to navigate by the stars, however.

"If His Dad Could Only See Him Now" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., February 22, 1922

Okay, let's get serious. (As George Washington once said, "I cannot tell a joke.") Dorman Smith was pretty pleased with how the Republicans were running things in Washington D.C., so he celebrated the fact that, unlike Europe, the U.S. hadn't been ravaged by war in 57 years. 

Nelson Harding, on the other hand, used Washington's birthday to comment on domestic legislation to grant a bonus to U.S. World War I veterans. The bonus itself was hugely popular, but the issue of how to pay for it had the bill hung up in Congress, and it failed to pass.

"Washington (D.C.)" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 22, 1922

When Congress made Washington's Birthday a national holiday in 1971, they managed to schedule it on a Monday that is never on his actual birthday, either Julian or Gregorian. Some people urged that the holiday be named Presidents' Day in order to include Abraham Lincoln, a name change that quickly become commonly accepted, in spite of not being the official name Congress gave to the third Monday in February. 

So here are some cartoons commemorating Abraham Lincoln on his 113th birthday, starting with some meticulous trompe l'oeil by the great Winsor McCay:

"Lest We Forget" by Winsor McCay for Star Publising, February 12, 1922

I'll follow that with a Lincoln cartoon from Leo Bushnell, like Nelson Harding, using a dead president's birthday to comment on paying bonuses to Great War veterans. 

"His Words Are as Apt Now As in '65" by Leo Bushnell for Central Press Assn., Feb. 12, 1922

The image of young Abe Lincoln studying in a log cabin by candle light has always been attractive for story-tellers, so it is hardly surprising that cartoonists would draw youngsters studying Mr. Lincoln in turn:

"Lincoln" by Magnus Kettner for Western Newspaper Union, February 22, 1922

Besides, they didn't have Doris Kearns Goodwin to draw studying Old Abe back then. She, by the way, has a 3-episode series about Lincoln coming up on the History Channel next week.

"Handicapped" by Gaar Williams in Chicago Tribune, February 22, 1922

And finally, a cartoon that is a little off topic today, except for that pissed-off portrait on the wall:

"The Interloper" by William C. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, ca. Feb. 24, 1922

I don't suppose Mr. Morris would have cared for this year's Superbowl halftime show, either. Or, for that matter, any of the other shows since Al Hirt, Doc Severensen, and Lionel Hampton got Tulane Stadium groovin' in 1970.

Well, that's all the festivity I can offer you this early on a Saturday morning. But if you're stretching your own Presidents' Day celebration all the way from here to Tues. 2/22/22, enjoy your 2²-day holiday weekend!

Believe Me I Can Tell You That

or, The Airports We Watched

You can expect the Fox News talking heads to spend all night explaining colonial air superiority at Fort McHendry.

February Festivities

So you have a cartoon due for February 2 and you've got no ideas and there's nothing in the news to inspire you and your bristol board is as white and pristine as the newfallen snow. So you look at the calendar and see, Oh, Goody! February 2 is Presentation of Our Lord! I'm saved!

No, of course it's Ground Hog Day, that wonderful festival when we all suddenly care what the weather is in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania for some reason (and how to spell it). I live in Wisconsin, where we're in for six more weeks of winter at the very least whether some overgrown rat sees its shadow or has the sense to stay in its burrow.

What's the ground hog got to do with it, anyway? Those Punxsutawney bastards don't have to drag the critter out of its box to figure out whether it's sunny or overcast.

But it's a holiday, even if it's rather one-dimensional, and you can always drag some inspiration for a hackneyed cartoon from it. Sadly, unlike Christmas, there's only one movie about Notorious GHD, and we've all drawn some version of this cartoon.

So perhaps you shouldn't discount Presentation of Our Lord Day so quickly. In Mexico, it's Candelaria, and time to take the yuletide decorations down. They celebrate forty days of Christmas, which is why having a live evergreen in the house and singing that partridge in a pear tree song have never caught on there.

Fortunately, February is chock full of holidays, unlike, say, August. With Valentines Day on the fourteenth, you have the quadrennial cartoons of presidential aspirants wooing the heart of the Republican elephant or Democratic donkey.

Or, if your governor's name is Tommy Thompson, you can pursue another Valentines Day theme.

Did you know that the Jewish equivalent of Valentines Day is Tu B'Av in August? Save that factoid for those late summer news doldrums!

Returning to February: Presidents' Day will come just in time so that the renewal of Trump's government shut-down can start on a day when the government was going to shut down anyway.

Just so you readers from around the world know, we don't celebrate all the presidents on Presidents' Day. Most Americans wouldn't know James Polk from Calvin Coolidge, and we'd be at each others' throats if someone tried to make the day about any president since JFK.

No, the day is all about Honest Abe Lincoln and Even More Honest George Washington, either of whom supplies our cartoonists with a smörgåsbord of clichés.

Finally, I'm not forgetting the most important February holiday of all: Superbowl Big Game Sunday. (Until I cough up the dough to be named Official Cartoonist of the NFL, I gotta be careful about infringement of that trademark.)

The story behind this cartoon is that when I was drawing for The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, editors Gary Miller, Mark Kass, or Steve Jagler would email me the topic (and usually the entire copy) of the coming issue's editorial so that I could draw a cartoon to accompany it. But this particular week, and they emailed me that the editorial board hadn't decided what the editorial should say; for a change, they were giving me carte blanche to draw about whatever I wanted (but taking into consideration that the Beej readership was very different from my audience at the UW-Milwaukee Post).

With the Green Bay Packers heading for The Big Game, however, there was precious little else being covered by Wisconsin news media. Packers cheerleading was the only memorable part of Tommy Thompson's State of the State message, fercryinoutloud.

I don't remember the editorial having been about managed stock funds, either.

Well, that's all for this edition of Sciuridaeback Saturday. It's time to take down the Christmas tree. We can't leave it up until Mardi Gras like we did last year.

Mardi Gras isn't until March.

It's All Fun And Games Until Someone Puts An Eye Out

Last week, some vandalous miscreant glued a pair of googly eyes onto the statue of Revolutionary War General Nathaniel Greene in Savannah, Georgia. A disgruntled royalist redcoat scallawag, I'll warrant!

Officials were able to excise the offending eyeballs without any damage to the statue, and are hot on the trail of the jocular oculist, hoping to head off a wave of googly eye vandalism from sweeping the country.

We are under threat of a dastardly assault on public art that, left unchecked, could even reach into the White House!

 

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.

Corinthia College

The current war of a word over the name of the Washington Redskins reminds me of when many colleges and high schools were going through the same debate back in the 1980's.

Two colleges in my area had teams known as the Redmen and the Warriors. The Carthage Red Men were originally named as the counterpart to a sister school's Blue Men, but the college flag showing a letter "C" sporting Native American warrior feathers left no doubt what the name had come to mean. The Marquette Warriors could just as easily have had a blue-faced kilt-wearing Pict wielding a claymore for their mascot, but in their case, Warrior meant "Willie Wampum."

To their credit, these colleges ultimately yielded to public pressure to change their team names (now Big Red and the Golden Eagles), but not without a good deal of rancor and resistance.

Drawing a comic strip about higher education for a student newspaper on a campus whose sports teams offended no ethnic sensitivity, I was inspired to introduce a sports department to my fictional campus. You may want to click on this image to embiggen:

The catch, as far as this gag goes, was that I had to come up with a team name that was ridiculous yet truly offensive. Most cartoons attempting this topic imagine insulting depictions of white people -- crackers, honkies, palefaces, trailer trash, etc. They're demeaning terms, but they demean the dominant majority culture, so it's okay, the theory goes. As a result, they annoy, but don't wound.

My next installment in the series was the last on this topic. I think you'll quickly see why.

I imagine that Corinthia College's sainted coach Elpirt Yalp would have been considered quite liberal in his day for his admiration of Negro Culture, to use the terminology of the time. But popular sensibility had risen above his lofty ideals by the 1980's. The Theater Department would have ceased performing darkie songs in blackface in the 1970's -- although there might still have been a fraternity forcing their pledges to do it.

In the end, one can claim that appropriating someone else's heritage for a sports logo, however well-intentioned it may have been once upon a time, never remains benign for long. A tomahawk chop becomes popular. The cartoonist designing your logo produces a racist caricature.

If you want an ethnic mascot, you might just have to look to your own background. The Minnesota Vikings and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish are free to celebrate their own heritage in a way that the Coachella Valley High School Arabs cannot.

Better yet, choose a feisty or majestic animal, or a respected profession. (Sorry, but "The Packers" is already taken.)

Q Toon: Two Things Make a Cartoon

When the Boy Scouts of America relented last year from its policy of banning gay boys from scouting, there was a lot of phony concern that somebody was trampling on the religious convictions of homophobes.

The BSA's ban on openly gay adults serving as scout leaders remains in place. When it came to light that Geoff McGrath, a gay former Eagle Scout, had accepted the post of scoutmaster of Troop 98 outside Seattle, Washington, the national organization came down hard on the United Methodist Church sponsoring the troop. The national BSA booted McGrath from his leadership position and revoked the troop's charter.

As Rev. Monica Corsaro, pastor of Rainier Beach UMC, explained for Time magazine,

We didn’t choose Geoff McGrath as a political statement. We chose Geoff because he was the perfect person for the job, an Eagle Scout himself, and someone who has a Master’s degree in Social Work. He has mentoring and leadership skills that someone taking on this role needs. A perfect fit. Geoff was quite willing, to serve as scoutmaster but was also nervous that his being gay would pose a problem for me and for the congregation. I assured him that putting him in the leadership of this troop would reflect and live out the values of our congregation, and that we would not have a troop at Rainier Beach UMC unless it was fully inclusive, because that is who we are. ...

Our congregation is the chartering organization for the troop, and yet I, as the pastor, had no contact from the BSA when they told Geoff that he was kicked out as a leader. Further, the BSA asked me and the congregation to violate our conscience and our religious beliefs by removing him as a leader of the Boy Scout troop when we know he is the most gifted for the leadership of the troop we chartered.

So there you have it. According to the BSA, antigay religious beliefs must be respected and protected, but gay-friendly religious beliefs are of no consequence whatsoever.

Q Toon: A Totally Gay Election

2012 will go down in history as the first year that voters approved marriage equality.

Different-sex marriage remains the law in Minnesota; but voters in Washington and Maryland approved prior action of their legislatures in favor of marriage equality, and voters in Maine overturned a previous referendum restricting marriage to straight couples. (And voters in Iowa rebuffed an effort to unseat a fourth justice of their Supreme Court who had ruled in favor of marriage equality in 2009.)

The six congressional candidates alluded to in this cartoon are incumbents Jared Polis (D-CO), David Cicilline (D-RI), and newly elected candidates Mark Pocan (D-WI), Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), Mark Takano (D-WA), and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). The lone gay candidate to lose last Tuesday was Republican Richard Tisei, who narrowly lost to incumbent John Tierney (D-MA).

I went somewhat out on a limb by including Sinema in that list when I drew the cartoon on Sunday night. That race wasn't called in her favor until Tuesday. She will be the first openly bisexual member of Congress, and possibly its second out atheist.

And I'm particularly proud that my home state elected Tammy Baldwin to the U.S. Senate. I'll admit that I occasionally had some doubts that Wisconsin would elect as Senator one of the most liberal members of the House (and I was not alone here) after making such a sharp turn to the right in 2010 and 2011. But, the unrelieved nastiness from all advertising comers in the fall notwithstanding, she did a great job of introducing herself to the voters while Tommy Thompson and his Republican rivals were busy attacking each other in the spring and summer.

÷ ÷ ÷

Regarding Saturday's blog entry about in the Strand Magazine, I've been trying to find the next article in Arthur Lord's series on American editorial cartoonists in 1902, so far without success. In fact, I have been unable to find Mr. Lord's article in Google's on-line digitization of the October, 1902 edition of Strand Magazine in which it is supposed to have appeared.

What Mr. Gus Frederick says on his Homer Davenport site is: "Through Ebay, I recently obtained a selection of nine original pages from the October, 1902 number of The Strand Magazine from London. This was an article entitled The American Cartoonist and His Work by Arthur Lord and featured short bios and examples of four 'famous' cartoonists of the day."

Mr. Frederick posted an Optical Character Recognition rendition of the text and illustrations rather than images of those nine pages, so we can't confirm that they have "The Strand Magazine" in the top margin of alternate pages, as the magazine would have had. I have so far found no reference to anyone in the U.S. or Canada having started up a "Strand Magazine" stateside, or that there was a separate North American edition of the London publication. (Perhaps in London, Ontario?)

One reason I suspect that the publication is American is the lack of any British condescension toward the New World cartoonists or the U.S. press. When Ohio Senator Mark Hanna is first mentioned in the article, it is by his last name alone, indicating that the author expected all of his readers to know who "Hanna" was. It's a reasonable assumption that American readers would recognize "Hanna" as the Karl Rove of William McKinley's presidency, but would British readers?

Mr. Frederick notes the British spellings -- "draughtsman," rather than "draftsman"; "abhour" instead of "abhor" -- and florid language of the article, but that doesn't guarantee that the pages were published in London. "American" spelling was not universally accepted in in this country in 1902. American spelling dates back at least as far as Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary, but there were resistance and ridicule when Teddy Roosevelt proposed making "simplified spelling" official in 1906.

My first thought was that the pages might be from another publication. I thought of Public Opinion, which was fond of printing editorial cartoons; but it was published weekly, not monthly, and doesn't appear to have attached bylines to its feature articles. It seems unlikely that Puck would have profiled a cartoonist from the competing Harper's Weekly while ignoring its own remarkable cartoonists. Harper's Weekly, of course, was published weekly; and, like any other magazine of its day, put its own name on the top of every page.

I'll keep looking.

Q Toon: Marriage Equality on Balance

With election day 13 days away, it's time for this cartoonist to stop frittering his time away on cartoons about National Coming Out Day, evangelicals slumming in the gayborhood, and TV sitcoms.

The 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals ruled last week that the federal "Defense of Marriage Act" (DOMA) is unconstitutional.

[Judge Dennis Jacobs] said the law was written so broadly that it touches more than a thousand federal laws. "Homosexuals are not in a position to adequately protect themselves from the discriminatory wishes of the majoritarian public," Jacobs wrote.
He rejected arguments by supporters of the law that it was intended to limit new categories of eligibility for federal funds, promote uniform administration of federal law, protect traditional marriage and encourage responsible procreation.
"Even if preserving tradition were in itself an important goal, DOMA is not a means to achieve it," he said.

That DOMA was headed for the Supreme Court was a virtual certainty, so the question is how the ruling will affect ballot initiatives in Minnesota, Maryland, Maine and Washington state on November 6. The legislatures of Maine, Maryland and Washington have voted for, and their governors have signed into law, marriage equality. Opposite-sex marriage exclusivity, on the other hand, is the law in Minnesota, where the Catholic Church is dropping everything else to enshrine it in the state constitution.

The Washington, opponents of marriage equality succeeded in putting Measure 74 on the ballot, possibly confusing voters because passage would actually affirm what the legislature and governor have already done.


In Maine, this marks the first time that gay-rights supporters -- rather than opponents -- have chosen to put same-sex marriage before voters. A gay-marriage law passed by the legislature in 2009 was overturned in a referendum that fall. Marriage equality supporters in the state decided to put a measure in support of marriage equality on the ballot this year, when the presidential election would draw out more voters.

The polls have the Minnesota amendment on the razor's edge, while there is reason to be cautiously optimistic about one of the other three states becoming the first in the nation to support marriage equality by popular referendum.

In Maryland, as in Maine and Washington, the most recent polls show a lead for the supporters of same-sex marriage. But comparable leads in other states -- notably in California in 2008 -- evaporated by Election Day, and Josh Levin, manager of the Marylanders for Marriage Equality campaign, expects the final result to be extremely close.

With races this close, anything, from a judge's ruling exciting one side, to the Obama and Romney campaigns' decision to focus their efforts elsewhere, could have an effect on the outcome.

Q Toon: No, #8

Justices of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last week continued the legal trend of finding marriage discrimination against same-sex couples unconstitutional.

Maggie Gallagher of NOM, and the others of her ilk, are wont to point out that wherever marriage equality has been put on the ballot, it has been defeated. Wherever it has been judged in the courts, the opposite is true.

This week's Q Syndicate cartoon/s

Voters in the states of Maine and Washington will go to the polls on November 3 to approve or rescind legislation passed by their representatives and signed by their governors. In Maine, the ballot question seeks to overturn marital equality; in Washington, religious conservatives want to overturn domestic partnership benefits.

I couldn't jigger this week's cartoon to account for both situations, but the magic of photoshop makes it possible to do two nearly identical cartoons without having to draw two actual cartoons.

So here's the Washington state version of the cartoon:

To my mind, the religious conservatives in Washington give evidence that their fight has nothing whatsoever to do with "preserving the sanctity of marriage," since same-sex couples in that state still have no right to marry. The issue for them is now, and always has been, punishing homosexuals for not being heterosexuals.