Q Toon: Off Limits

Never satisfied that there happen to be Democratic and Independent voters out there whose right to vote they haven't taken away, Republicans are pushing yet another plot to throw voters off the rolls.

Calling their scheme the "SAVE Act," the bill as passed by the House "requires individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections," according to www.congress.gov. And by "documentary proof," Republicans mean your birth certificate.

The Senate version of the bill requires voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship not only when registering to vote, but also every time they come to cast their vote. Every time.

What could possibly be the problem?

But one in 10 voting-age American citizens, or an estimated 21.3 million people, either don't have a proof-of-citizenship document like a birth certificate, passport or naturalization certificate, or don't have easy access to one, according to a 2023 survey commissioned by voting rights groups. The survey found people of color are more likely not to have a document proving citizenship.

Obtaining these documents takes time and money. Only about 43% of Americans have passports, according to an analysis by the Voting Rights Lab. The bill says voters can show an ID that indicates citizenship, but currently only five states — Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Washington — offer IDs that meet that criteria.

One rather significant group that faces disenfranchisement should the SAVE Act pass the Senate is married women who have taken their husband's surname — whose legal name therefore does not match the name on their birth certificate. A smaller group, but one well-represented in my LGBTQ+ readership, are transgender citizens who have changed their name to match their gender identity.

An even smaller group consists of the Vice President of the United States, Mr. James David Vance, né James Donald Bowman.

SAVE's defenders say that all that married women, transgender persons, and J.D. Vance need is to provide certified documentation of their name change. But there again, those documents cost time and money — and for transgender people in "red" states, dealing with a hostile government bureaucracy.

Side note: As my little form of protest, I've been bringing my passport to the village polling place for identification ever since state Republicans passed photo ID voting into law several years ago. Some poll workers have been taken aback by my showing a passport instead of my driver's license like everybody else. 

Passports do nothing to prove that one resides in the polling district (and I suspect that there are a few owners of summer homes and winter get-aways — a more or less Republican demographic — who have used a driver's license to vote in one location and a passport to vote in another, especially to keep those property taxes down and school levies defeated).

The South American vacation from which I've just returned was within three months of my passport expiring, which meant that I had to apply for a new one before we left. That automatically voided my existing passport, but poll workers here in the village would have had no way of knowing it was invalid had I used it as voter ID in elections last fall or this week's spring primary.

(Lest some Trumpster at DOJ launch any voter fraud investigations against me, my village had no elections in November and no primary races on Tuesday.)

Returning to the topic at hand: The SAVE Act also voids independent voter registration drives. It federalizes elections, demanding that states turn over their voter registration records to the Department of Homeland Security. Mailed ballots from military service members that arrive after Election Day won't count; universal mail-in voting will be outlawed. 

If this SAVE Act slips through the Senate to be signed into law by the Felon In Chief, you can bet your bottom dollar that Republicans won't be satisfied for long. They're sure to pass a SUPERSAVER Act requiring voters to come to their polling place DNA samples from all four grandparents, the deed to their house, and an automobile-dealership-sized American flag.

After all, if Barack Obama's birth certificate wasn't good enough for them, why would they accept yours?

Q Toon: Bubble, Bubble, Toilet Trouble

Delaware, the First State in the Union, is now also the First State in the Union Represented by a Transgender American.

Democrat Sarah McBride, whose deadname is Nunnoyer Dambizness, won election as the state's one and only Representative in the 119th Congress, and Republican panties immediately entered into wad mode. South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace led the hue and cry that Congresswoman-elect McBride would not be welcome in women's rest rooms anywhere in the Capitol building.

Speaker Mike Johnson, whose duties include assigning toilet stalls, readily acquiesced to Mace's demands, publishing a new rule that lavatory use must align with one's gender as assigned at birth, no matter what changes may have taken place in the meantime. His order gently suggested that members can avail themselves of the personal lavatory facilities in their own offices; and McBride has accepted the crapper command calmly and professionally.

It may not have occurred to the Transphobic Caucus that not all transgender persons have transitioned from male to female. There are some people who have found their peace transitioning in the opposite direction. While none of those persons have yet been elected to Congress, I expect that Congresswoman Mace will suffer advanced conniptions if she ever hears that Chaz Bono has come to lobby the legislature after a heavy lunch.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi might offer that Mace's complaints are much ado about chicken shit. We all remember how much deference the Trumpster mob showed to female sensitivities when they came to lobby Capitol Hill to overturn the 2020 election on 1/6.

Q Toon: Kind of a Drag

Some presumably disgruntled ex-staffer of Requblican Congresssbro Madison Cawthorn (Q-NC) leaked a couple of party photos of Cawthorn to Politico last week. The photos show Cawthorn wearing women's lingerie as some laughing ladies look on.

I can't blame a kid for wanting to explore his feminine side, even if he has gone on record (just last week, as it happens) tweeting that "There is only one God and two genders."

Not much is known about the context of the photos; it them, Cawthorn is in a wheelchair, so they must have been taken after the 2014 car accident that left him partly paralyzed. He has explained that the photos were taken on a cruise sometime before he ran for Congress in 2020, so I guess we have to chalk this up to "youthful indiscretion."

Cawthorn is only 26, so any youthful indiscretions of his are still pretty recent. He wasn't responsible for that car crash, but he is responsible for his lie that his friend who was driving the car left him to die in the fiery wreck, and for using that lie in a campaign ad. (In fact, the friend dragged him to safety.)

Or his lie that he was accepted to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

Or his brief college career distinguished only for his track record of sexually predatory behavior toward numerous coeds.

Or attacking a reporter for "quit[ting] his academia job in Boston to work for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office." Cawthorn subsequently apologized that "the syntax of our language was unclear and unfairly implied I was criticizing Cory Booker" — but not for the unmistakably clear message that working for a non-white male was somehow a dastardly thing for the reporter to have done.

It's hard to keep up with Master Cawthorn's youthful indiscretions. Since I drew this cartoon, he got himself in trouble trying to board an airplane with a loaded gun in his carry-on bag — such an understandable oversight, given that the law about carrying loaded guns onto commercial planes is older than he is.

And just last week, he was a no-show at his court date for speeding and driving after his license had been revoked.

You might not have heard about any of those youthful indiscretions; but you probably had heard that only last month, Cawthorn boasted on a podcast that other Republican Congresslewdies had invited him to a "sexual get-together" — an invitation he apparently accepted...

"The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington ... being kind of a young guy in Washington, where the average age is probably 60 or 70 — [you] look at all these people, a lot of them that I've looked up to through my life, I've always paid attention to politics. ... Then all of a sudden you get invited — 'We're going to have a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come.' ... What did you just ask me to come to? And then you realize they're asking you to come to an orgy. ... Some of the people leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and then you watch them do a key bump of cocaine right in front of you. And it's like, this is wild."

...unless the bump of cocaine was at some other Republican get-together. 

Being a lying, racist, sexist frat boy, and a reckless illegal driver to boot, was one thing. Shooting his mouth off on the internets was a youthful indiscretion too far even for spineless Kevin McCarthy, who called Mad Caw in on the carpet for a good finger-wagging. 

Didn't the kid realize that Matt Gaetz and Don Jr. are in enough trouble as it is?

Q Toon: Usurp, Isurp, WeAllsurp

Republican state governors and legislators who very recently were busy passing mandates against transgender students using school lavatories have lately become convinced that mandates are bad things.

That is, as long as those mandates are protecting students from a real, unimagined threat that has actually killed 4.5 million people worldwide in less than two years.

For some unfathomable reason, they insist that requiring measures to combat the spread of COVID-19 and its variants is nothing at all like previously existing requirements to protect students from measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, polio, and the like.

It is not as if this were a novel question of whether the general welfare is outweighed by an individual's right to be Typhoid Mary. The Supreme Court ruled in 1905 (Jacobson v. Massachusetts) that local boards of health could be authorized to mandate vaccination of the general population against smallpox. That ruling left open the possibility of exempting children from the mandate; but seventeen years later, the Court (Zucht v. King) let stand a school board edict — in Texas, no less — barring unvaccinated kids from classrooms.

It remains to be seen whether the current right-wing Court will overturn these long-established cases — nothing is certain under its present partisan domination. What is inevitable is that Big Government Republicans like Governors Abbott and DeSantis will do everything within and beyond their power to deny local school boards the ability to protect the staff and students in their charge.

Q Toon: School Safety Drill

Faced with a fourth surge of the coronavirus sweeping the nation, Republican governors and legislators have been falling over each other to see which of them can do the best job of channeling Amity Island Mayor Larry Vaughn.

A number of them have acted to forbid school districts and state universities from taking the simplest measures to ensure the health and safety of students and staff. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has threatened to cut funding to any school district that requires students to wear masks in the classroom. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued his own executive order to the same effect. Republicans running the Wisconsin state legislature want the University of Wisconsin to beg for the politicians' permission before making any COVID-19-related decisions whatsoever.

Even Alabama Governor Kay "Start Blaming the Unvaccinated Folks" Ivey says there's no reason why a couple dozen children too young to be vaccinated should be required to mask up just because they are cooped up in a classroom together for hours at a time five days a week for months on end. It's Alabama. They can open a window.

I suppose Tennessee teachers and students should be grateful that Governor Bill Lee is willing to leave responding to the COVID-19 crisis up to individual school systems. Tennessee Republicans have their hands full trying to keep transgender students out of school bathrooms and locker rooms, and are too busy to play Doctor like the other legislatures.

And South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is probably preoccupied making sure that the Sturgis Bike Week Superspreader Rally goes off without a hitch. And maybe running for president, or at least to fill Sarah Palin's shoes. She's kind of tired of all this coronavirus stuff, and she thinks you are, too.

So let's all go swimming! Statistically, your chances of being attacked by a shark are actually very small. And most people who are attacked by sharks survive, don't they?

Q Toon: Our Menu Hasn't Changed

In the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre, the Florida legislature famously leapt into action to protect Florida students from the threat of deadly pornography.

And it didn't end there. Under the eyes of the surviving students, the Florida legislature went on to require the prominent posting of "In God We Trust" in all Florida classrooms. The gun control measures being urged by those students were quickly shelved because, unlike advertising Christianity on the wall, they wouldn't be 100% effective against future gun violence.

Well, to be fair, they also voted to approve letting Miss Othmar pack a pistol in class.

But let us not single out the Florida legislature for their commitment to non-responsive measures.

Republican legislators in Indiana are pushing a "No Promo Homo" bill, SB 65, that would explicitly prohibit the positive portrayal of homosexuality in schools. Ballot measures in Alaska, Alabama, Massachusetts and Montana seek to prevent or overturn state and local anti-discrimination laws based on gender identity in public places such as hotels, restaurants and stores.

Pennsylvania lawmakers have repeatedly tried to bar transition-related health coverage under Pennsylvania’s Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). New Hampshire lawmakers are considering a set of bills that to bar Medicaid from paying for transition-related care, prohibit minors from obtaining gender confirmation surgery and allow medical practitioners to decline to treat patients on the basis of  “their religious, moral, or ethical convictions.”

"Bathroom bills" are still being pushed in Kentucky, where one out of every five legislators is a sponsor of one bill, in Iowa, and in Wisconsin. Yet pushback against these bills is not limited to the LGBTQ community alone; business and industry have come to the defense of their LGBTQ employees and prospects — so much so that there appears to be little interest in resurrecting bathroom bills that have already been defeated in Georgia and Texas.

They have more important things to worry about, after all.

The President is coming for their guns.

Q Toon: Loaded Response

I settled down in front of my drawing board last weekend after one of those weeks when LGBTQ issues just seemed insignificant relative to all the other news.

The week started with Donald Joffrey Trump responding to North Korean threats of nuclear attacks against the U.S. with overheated "fire and fury" rhetoric of his own. Nuclear war seemed so likely that even Wall Street suddenly snapped out of its giddy response to Trump's lazy faire economic policies.

Then fascists wielding semi-automatic rifles, swastikas, Ku Klux Klan banners and tiki torches marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, where one of their number ran over a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring 19. Trump blurted out that "many sides, many sides" were responsible, driving the Korea story right off the front page (to the relief of Wall Street).

After two days, Trump begrudgingly read a statement assigning blame to the Nazis and Klansmen, but then stunningly revoked that statement at an unhinged press conference the next day. Beggaring credulity, Trump insisted that some participants in the march organized by the website The Daily Stormer, the Neo-Confederate League of the South, the National Policy Institute, and the National Socialist Movement are actually "very fine people." Perhaps those people were only Nazi sympathizers.

Why would Trump leap to the defense of the indefensible?

With his approval ratings down to 33% of the electorate, Trump can't afford to piss off Nazis and the Klan. As the sane, reasonable portion of the minority of voters who elected him slowly develop buyer's remorse, Nazis, Klansmen and their ilk become an evermore significant part of Trump's remaining base.

He is losing support among previously sympathetic corporate and labor leaders. Led by Merck chief executive Ken Frazier,  eight members of Trump's Strategy & Policy Forum and his Manufacturing Council resigned from them over his inability to distinguish a moral difference between his fascist base and anti-fascist protesters; Trump then disbanded the councils before any more businessmen could defect.

At this point, however, not a single member of Trump's Evangelical Council has resigned. They have no problem associating themselves with a Nazi sympathizer sympathizer.

💩

As long as I've brought up Bathroom Bills, let's pause for a moment to celebrate one gleam in the sh¡tstorm: the Texas legislature adjourned its special session without passing Senate Bill 6. A legislative priority for Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and the theocratic right, the Texas Bathroom Bill was opposed by the Republican House Speaker Joe Straus, as well as by the Texas business community and the state's professional sports teams.

💩

On Monday, I invited you to guess who that was kibitzing over my shoulder in this week's cartoon. For the answer, look through the list of keywords at the end of this post.

And should you wish to share or link directly to this week's cartoon, throw some traffic to the news outlets which run my cartoon. Try here, here, or here.

Q Toon: The Eyes of Texas

Here I thought over the weekend, as I settled at my drawing board to work on this week's Q Syndicate cartoon, that I'd be able to get ahead of the news cycle by drawing about Texas's "Bathroom Bill," which was passed by the state Senate late Tuesday night, 21 to 20.

Well, thanks to the Twit in the White House, there's a much bigger LGBT issue dominating the news cycle.

In a series of three tweets, written in more formal language than we are accustomed to seeing from him, mercurial American President Donald "Bone Spur" Trump abruptly halted the Pentagon's progress toward welcoming transgender service men and women in the U.S. military.

“After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow ... Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming ... victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you”

As others have pointed out, the "tremendous medical costs" of transgender service members are dwarfed by the medical cost in our military budget of boner pills. Since the estimates of the numbers of transgender service members vary widely, their "medical costs" to the military range widely as well -- but it's still only .001% of the Pentagon's overall budget.

By analyzing private health insurance data on gender transition-related expenditures, (such as hormone therapy or surgical treatment, for instance), researchers found that Military Health System costs could increase by $2.4 million and $8.4 million per year if it were extended to cover the estimated 1,320 to 6,630 transgender people in the military. This amount pales in comparison to the Department of Defense's $49.3 billion health care expenditures in 2014, for example, and would represent between 0.005% to 0.017% of the department's overall health care costs, according to the study.
Overall, the study estimated that only 29–129 service members would seek gender transition–related care per year, and 30 to 140 personnel would seek hormone therapy. Another 25 to 130 personnel would seek surgical treatment.

Perhaps Mr. Trump – or Mike Pence, or one of those hand-laying evangelicals from last week, or whoever had spoken to Donald Duce last – has his panties in a wad that once the U.S. military opens itself to transgender recruits, gender reassignment surgery will suddenly rocket in popularity from sea to shining sea.

Ahem. This blog post was supposed to be about the Texas Bathroom Bill, and I've practically ignored the topic altogether.

Another tweet, this one from comedian Mark Agee, brings the two topics back together:

"Sorry I was led to believe that trans people were so skilled in combat that I should fear being alone in a bathroom with them."

As the newsmedia cover Trump's ban, members of the Texas legislature might want to keep in mind that those manly guys being interviewed as representatives of transgender soldiers and veterans are the very men that Senate Bill 3 requires to use the ladies' room. Your womenfolk are not going to appreciate that.

The line for the ladies' room is long enough.

Q Toon: Go Away, Kid, You Bother Me

I shouldn't admit this, but the one thing that doesn't work in this cartoon is its very premise.

Not the part about Ivanka's tweets. That much was real.

But if there's one thing you and I know about Mr. Donald Joffrey Trump, it is that he is not really, really busy making policy decisions with his staff this month. He's watching TV today, phone in hand, ready to cast self-serving — check that, make that deranged — tweets about Jim Comey's Senate testimony.

He's also not dedicated to any philosophy, antigay or otherwise, other than continuing the con job that has so improbably propelled him from real estate swindler to Trump University scammer to children's charity fraudster to President of the United States. The men on the other side of the table in this cartoon may be dedicated to slashing the budget for HIV/AIDS, blessing discrimination against same-sex couples, and keeping transgender persons out of public lavatories, but Trump is interested only in keeping the suckers who have thus far fallen for his con job from turning against him.

On top of all that, doesn't Jared have something he's supposed to be doing, like bringing peace to the Middle East, running the Office of American Innovation, setting up super-secret back channels to the FSB, diverting the doomsday asteroid, or something?

Backward Christian Soldiers

Donald Joffrey Trump's nominee for Secretary of the Army is a Tennessee state legislator named Mark Green (R-Clarksville). Where Barack Obama opened the U.S. military to LGBTQ service members and appointed Eric Fanning to be the first openly gay head of any branch of the U.S. military, it is clear that Trump is issuing the military an about-face.

Green is a lead sponsor of a bill guaranteeing educators a right to discriminate against LGBTQ persons, and backs another bill allowing mental health practitioners to refuse to treat LGBTQ patients. The West Point graduate sponsored a Tennessee "bathroom bill," and another bill prohibiting local governments from enforcing antidiscrimination policies protecting LGBTQ citizens.

Green's bigotry comes cloaked in religiosity. He told a radio interviewer that because of St. Paul's letter to the Romans:

"...as a state senator, my responsibility very clearly in Romans 13 is to create an environment where people who do right are rewarded, and people who do wrong are crushed. Evil is crushed. And so I'm going to protect women in their bathrooms, and I'm going to protect our state against potential infiltration by Syrian ISIS people through a  refugee program." 

Speaking to a Tea Party Koffee Klatch in Chattanooga, Green said transgender persons are mentally diseased, deriding them as "guys and gals with question marks." He also told the group that legalized same-sex marriage might lead to using taxpayer dollars for infanticide.

His animus is by no means limited to gays, lesbian, and transgender persons. At that same Koffee Klatch, he enthusiastically supported a variety of other tenets of Tea Partisan faith:

To a questioner who worried about armed insurrection by people who “don’t belong here, like Muslims in the United States,” Green said it was a “great question.” Referring to the “Muslim horde” that sacked Constantinople five centuries ago, Green agreed that we must “take a stand on the indoctrination of Islam in our public schools”—even as he vowed to spread the Christian light into the military and the culture as he had as a young missionary in a Muslim section of Toronto.
Green agreed with a questioner that President Obama is not a citizen and he refused to answer whether the former president is really a Muslim. Asked what could account for a mysterious rise in Latinos registering to vote in Tennessee, Green theorized they were “being bused here probably.”

Green's confirmation is not a sure thing, given skepticism expressed by Senate Armed Services Chair John McCain and others.

“The statements he has made on a number of fronts — in particular to the LGBT community, to different minority groups, different religious groups — are a great, great concern toward military readiness,” said [Iraq War verteran Daniel] Feehan, who served as principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for readiness from 2015 until earlier this year.
It’s already hard enough to recruit a talented, diverse military to accomplish critical missions, Feehan said. Green’s record and public statements will make that job even more difficult by creating an environment in which potential recruits might feel unwelcome, Feehan said.

On the list of organizations opposed to Green's nomination are GLAAD, Outserve-SLDN, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Human Rights Campaign, the American Military Partner Association, and the Truman National Security Project, the last of which wrote:

"As every military leader knows, unit readiness at every level is built on mutual trust, often referred to as unit cohesion. When leaders denigrate service members on the basis of their personal characteristics, it undermines that essential trust. As several of you know firsthand, that can be the difference success and failure on the battlefield."

Reports earlier this week that Green might withdraw his nomination are so far being denied. If those reports prove correct, Green would be Trump's second Army Secretary nominee to pull out; billionaire Vincent Viola withdrew his nomination on the grounds that he couldn't extricate himself from several conflicts of interest with his family businesses. (Trump’s pick for Navy Secretary, financier Philip Bilden, also dropped out of consideration, citing similar business conflicts. President Trump Inc. could learn a thing or two from Viola and Bilden.)

Yet Republicans have been more than happy to stock all branches of government with reactionary right-wing apparatchiks, and party leadership is likely to pressure its wavering members to fall in line and approve whomever Trump wants. There is nothing the GOP values more highly than partisan unity.

Reversing any and all progress made by the Obama administration, however, ranks a very close second.

Q Toon: Repeal and Replace

The North Carolina legislature finally passed, and Governor Roy Cooper signed, a repeal of its odious HB2, better known as the Bathroom Bill, last week.

But before we all celebrate the triumph of reason over hysteria, there are one or two details lurking in the replacement bill, HB142.

The deal removes the requirement that transgender people must use the restroom that matches the sex on their birth certificate but leaves state legislators in charge of policy on public restrooms. The proposal also bans local governments from passing nondiscrimination ordinances affecting private employers until December 2020. 

Governor Cooper lamely explained that justice delayed was better than justice "permanently denied." Of more importance to him and to the millions of basketball fans in the state, however, was the NCAA's threat to permanently deny hosting championship basketball games to the Tarheel State if the law wasn't repealed by March 30. With the passage of HB142 just before the buzzer, the NCAA gave its half-hearted support to the less-than-half-hearted repeal.

While the new law meets the minimal NCAA requirements, the board remains concerned that some may perceive North Carolina’s moratorium against affording opportunities for communities to extend basic civil rights as a signal that discriminatory behavior is permitted and acceptable, which is inconsistent with the NCAA Bylaws.
However, we recognize the quality championships hosted by the people of North Carolina in years before HB2. And this new law restores the state to that legal landscape: a landscape similar to other jurisdictions presently hosting NCAA championships.
We are actively determining site selections, and this new law has minimally achieved a situation where we believe NCAA championships may be conducted in a nondiscriminatory environment.

The NBA has yet to weigh in on HB142; more important will be whether it will be enough to change the minds of companies who had been convinced not to invest, locate or expand in North Carolina. The loss of such firms as PayPal, CoStar Realty, Deutsche Bank, and Google Ventures, added to the lost sports events and concert performances has cost North Carolina over $630 million.

I wouldn't blame them if they decided to put off any further decisions until, oh, say, December, 2020.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Just to clarify one item from my April 1 post: while some of the post is stuff I made up, the name of "Crybaby" Boobie (and of all the other Peanuts characters, for that matter) were not.

I had to look Boobie and her doubles partner, "Bad Call" Bennie, up on GoComics.com; I only knew of them from a Peanuts book I bought in Italy last year for brushing up on my very limited Italian during bus rides. In the book, their names are "Piangina" Boobie and "Bugia" Benny, and Google Translate doesn't quite take one all the way to the names Charles Schulz gave them.

Buona dolore!

Q Toon: End Around

The Donald Joffrey Trump administration announced this week that whether or not transgender students can safely pee in school lavatories should be up to state legislatures to decide. So let's take a look at how that's going, shall we?

Republicans in the state of Texas are pushing Senate Bill 6, the Lone Star version of North Carolina's phenomenally unsuccessful Bathroom Bill to require men who were born female to use the ladies' room and women who were born male to use the men's room. As in North Carolina, SB6 is aimed at overturning local ordinances and school policies protecting transgender rights.

The National Football League and National Basketball Association have come out against Texas's "Bathroom Bill," warning that if any bill seen as "discriminatory or inconsistent with our values were to become law there, that would certainly be a factor considered when thinking about awarding future events."

With a potential loss of hundreds of millions in sports revenue, Texas Governor Greg Abbott shot back, "We don't care what the NFL thinks and certainly what their political policies are because they are not a political arm of the state of Texas or the United States of America. They need to learn their place in the United States, which is to govern football, not politics.”

Y'all remember when Thomas Jefferson about the wall of separation between sports and state.

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and bill supporter Sen. Dawn Buckingham (R-Austin) protested that sports venues are exempt from SB6. Maybe.

When asked whether businesses and sporting venues would definitely be exempt, [Buckingham] added, "Well, we'll see what the language looks like, but it's my understanding that that's the intent — to realize that there are some complicating factors there and our priorities are really the schools."

Sports organizations may be the most prominent opponents of the legislation, but they are not alone. Major investment firms have also warned Texas of their opposition to the bill.

"As professional investors, we know that discrimination is simply bad for business," Matthew Patsky, CEO of Trillium Asset Management, which signed the letter, told the teleconference.

A coalition of Texas convention and tourism leaders predicts a short-term GDP losses of $8 billion in revenue. Bob Jameson, president and CEO of the Fort Worth Convention and Visitors Bureau, worries that the impact to his city alone could be massive:

"Business and leisure tourism delivers a $2 billion economic impact each year in Fort Worth and supports more than 20,000 jobs. An important driver behind that is our friendly hospitality and a strong message that all are welcome here. We want to maintain that.”

“Restroom laws are one of the top policy deterrents for planning conventions, conferences and meetings,” said Deborah Sexton, president and CEO of the Professional Convention Management Association. “Our industry holds 1.83 million meetings annually and brings $28 billion in U.S. federal, state and local taxes annually; with more than $280 billion in annual U.S. direct spending spurred by our sector. Should SB6 be signed into law, you ensure Texas’s future percentage of these taxes and spending will exponentially be reduced.”

Sookie Spice

With a new administration comes a host of new Saturday Night Live characters, and White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's combative daily briefings have quickly shown him to be ripe for parody. It may be a one-joke sketch, but then, isn't that special? So are nearly all memorable SNL characters.

Because they're good enough, they're smart enough, and doggone it, people like them!

I had to draw this one quickly. HB2 clones are currently moving through the digestive tract of legislatures in Alabama, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, New York, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming; several of those states are immune to the threat of never hosting another Superbowl.

Q Toon: Certainly Not GOP Shy

This cartoon was drawn last Saturday and Sunday, and sent to my editors on Monday morning, well before a certain story leaked out about a particular president-elect of the United States.

So what is it about Republicans and their obsession with excretory functions?

North Carolina Republicans passed their notorious HB2 last year, and even faced with the loss of business, coveted sports events, and the governorship, decided that regulating transgender persons' use of public lavatories was more important than any of that. Charlotte rescinded the equal rights ordinance at the center of the HB2 controversy as part of a deal with Republicans to repeal the state law; but when it came time for Republicans to hold up their end of the deal, they refused.

This year, Republicans in several state legislatures have rushed to the side of their Tarheel brethren, introducing a slew of bathroom bills of their own. In a few, such as Virginia and Minnesota, the bills stand little chance of getting past a Democratic governor. But in others, such as Texas, there is no such check on the legislature, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick there is a vocal proponent. Here in Wisconsin, we have plenty of experience of Gov. Scott Walker quickly signing Republican legislation that he earlier claimed was "not a priority."

So Republicans are all in to confront the non-existent threat of transgender persons launching a wave of sexual assaults in public rest rooms. What can we do about it?

Tell them to piss off.

Q Toon: Diary of a Wimpy Gov

After the North Carolina-based Atlantic Coast Conference joined the NBA and NCAA in pulling their championship games out of the state over HB2 (the so-called "Bathroom Bill" passed to overturn Charlotte's LGBT rights ordinance), Governor Pat McCrory and Republicans in the state legislature made Charlotte a desperate offer:

Repeal your ordinance, Charlotte, and we'll repeal our law repealing your ordinance.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts is having none of it, telling the Charlotte Observer, "There's no legal reason for Charlotte to do anything."

City Attorney Bob Hagemann agreed. In the memo to Roberts and the council, he said the council’s failure to repeal the ordinance “is in no way a legal obstacle or impediment to the General Assembly’s ability to modify or repeal House Bill 2 as it deems appropriate.”

With North Carolina LGBT Pride underway in Raleigh-Durham this weekend, Charlotte should see plenty of support for its position.

✒

I hope it's not too much of a stretch to depict Gov. McCrory as Wimpy from the Popeye cartoons. The two have very different facial types; McCrory's face is tall with a prominent nose and a crooked mouth; Wimpy has a round face with a round nose and a mouth that only shows up when he's eating. Wimpy's eyes leave plenty of room for his ample forehead; to caricature McCrory, the eyes have to be high on his face, and he has a full head of hair. On the other hand, both seem to squint a lot.

North Carolina cartoonist V.C. Rogers complimented me on a caricature of McCrory I'd sent for the display of HB2 cartoons up at the AAEC's Political Cartoon and Satire Festival this week. He took note of how I drew his nose; Rogers doesn't take the same approach, but produces an instantly recognizable likeness nevertheless. When I had drawn McCrory with a smaller nose earlier this year, I hadn't been quite satisfied with the result.

Most of the other cartoonists in the Tarheel State exaggerate their governor's schnozz, if not generally quite as much as I have this week. Kevin Siers has cast him in a Punch 'n' Judy show. Dwayne Powell often draws McCrory as a parrot. John Cole doesn't make the nose quite so prominent, but he keeps it tall.

The chef of the Charlotte Cafe, on the other hand, does not, and is not intended to resemble Mayor Roberts in any way. (The reference is to the character Roughhouse. And I hasten to add that this cartoon was drawn well before the protests over the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott by Charlotte police yesterday. Most of this blog post was, as well.)

If You Must Visit North Carolina

Photo by Jape Trostle

If you happen to be in Durham, North Carolina this summer, do stop in at the Horse & Buggy Press Bull City Arts Collaborative to see the exhibit of cartoons and installations about the Tarheel State's HB2 (the "Bathroom Bill"). I see one of my own cartoons over the shoulder of the guy in the checked shirt in J.P.'s photo above.

The show will be up in the gallery on Foster St. in Durham through the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists' convention in September.

Q Toon: All Star Heel

The National Basketball Association announced last week that it is moving the 2017 All-Star Game out of Charlotte, North Carolina, over the HB2, the state's "bathroom bill" requiring transgender persons to use the bathroom of the opposite sex, as well as granting Christians special rights to discriminate against LGBT citizens and visitors to the state.

“While we recognize that the NBA cannot choose the law in every city, state, and country in which we do business, we do not believe we can successfully host our All-Star festivities in Charlotte in the climate created by HB2.”

Governor McCrory is sticking by his law, complaining that a "selective corporate elite" is "bypassing the democratic process."

HB2, you may recall, was passed this past March in a hastily called special one-day legislative session and quickly signed by McCrory that night. There was no opportunity for anybody but a selective Republican elite to engage in the democratic process beforehand.

Q Toon: Stall Tactics

Most of the media covering Donald Berzilius Trump have been focusing this week on the donations he promised to veterans' charities, and his petulant response to being questioned about it. (I suspect that voters don't care how Trump treats the media quite as much as the media do.)

The Donald was more comfortable answering questions on Jimmy Kimmel Live last week, even when the topic of transgender people and their bathroom needs arose.

The actual exchange:

KIMMEL: “You said, and I thought this was very interesting, you believe that transgendered people should be able to use whatever bathroom they want to which is contrary to what a lot of people, most people, in your party believe. Why do you think people have focused on that?”
TRUMP: “What really I’m saying is—and I think it’s pretty simple—let the states decide. And you know, we have to protect everybody. It’s a very, very small group. Right now, it’s a very small group.”
KIMMEL: “Would you say though, if you were voting personally or a member of New York State, you would vote for that right?”
TRUMP: “Well, the party generally believes that whatever you’re born, that’s the bathroom you use.”
KIMMEL: “Well, what about you?”
TRUMP: “Me? I say let the states decide.”
KIMMEL: “Would you personally support it? I think you do.”
TRUMP: “Would I support—no, what I support is let the states decide and I think the states will do hopefully the right thing.”
KIMMEL: “And what’s the right thing?”
TRUMP: “I don’t know yet. I mean, I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know.

That's really being unafraid to tell it like it is.

One thing that concerns me is Trump's comment that "It's a very, very small group. Right now, it's a very small group." He leaves open the possibility that this "very small group" might not be such a small group later on; and if we've learned anything about The Donald, it's that if you give him enough time to come up with an outrageous solution to a perceived threat, he will.

Q Toon: Finding the Perfect Tone

I ran across somebody's complaint recently about focusing so much LGBT attention on the bathroom clauses of these bathroom bills in North Carolina, Mississippi, and elsewhere. We're not paying enough heed, the argument went, to the "religious liberty" clauses creating the right of wedding photographers, bakers and florists, not to mention therapists, pharmacists paramedics, and tow truck operators to discriminate against gays, lesbians, and bisexuals.

To which oversight, I suppose, transgender persons must sympathize. Through the years they've been quietly dropped from various efforts to win LGB folks rights to equal employment, military service, marriage, and so on.

So, anyway, I've managed to include the bakers and florists in panel one.

In my home state of Wisconsin, state representative Jesse Kremer, R-Kewaskum, has reintroduced his bathroom bill, claiming that it's purely needed to criminalize the heretofore legal activity of sexually assaulting children in public bathrooms, and that it isn't aimed at transgender lavatory customers at all.

"There have been individuals in society for hundreds of years that believe they are a different gender. That's not the problem here," Kremer said. "The problem is that there are going to be people that are going to take advantage of the situation."

His protestations might carry more weight if we hadn't been equally assured that Republicans' voter ID laws had nothing to do with thwarting Democratic voters, and that Act 10 had nothing to do with breaking unions. We've become inured to the repeated spectacle of Governor Snotwalker telling us some right-wing agenda item is "not a priority" only to have him sign it into law within the week. I just can't believe you guys. Ever.

🚽

Nationally, Kremer and his ilk are the same people who complain that their rights are being trampled upon if someone wishes them Happy Holidays or offers them the choice of whether or not to marcar dos para español. Keep that in mind whenever they pretend that their efforts to write discrimination into the law have nothing to do with the people they want to discriminate against.