Q Toon: Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back in the Lair

He's back! And just in time for Hallowe'en.

The Supreme Court heard opening arguments in Chiles v. Salazar last week.

Kaley Chiles, who bills herself as a Christian therapist, has sued the state of Colorado over its Minor Conversion Therapy Law (MCTL), which bars mental health professionals from offering "conversion therapy," the widely discredited practice of pressuring a patient who identifies as LGBTQ+ to change their sexual orientation.

Chiles, who is a practicing Christian, contends that although she does not try to “convert” her clients, she does try to help them with objectives that may include “seeking to reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions” or becoming more comfortable with their bodies. Chiles filed a lawsuit in Colorado, asking a federal court to block the state from enforcing the conversion therapy ban against her.

Colorado has not taken any action to enforce its ban against Chiles, or, for that matter, anyone else during the six years that the MCTL has been on its books, which brings into question what standing she has to bring a case to the nation's highest court. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out, "we [even] have the entity charged with administering the law saying 'We’re not going to apply it to your kind of … therapy.'" 

That didn't stop the right-wing "Alliance Defending Freedom" from bringing the case before a Court majority eager to overrule Colorado's legislature, or the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime™ from filing an amicus curiae brief in support. Calling Colorado's law "blatant viewpoint discrimination," Justice Samuel Alito, for one, agrees with the plaintiff's argument that while the law does allow exceptions for religious practice, it violates her freedom of speech.

Twenty other states have laws similar to Colorado's MCTL, which could very well be rendered moot by Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Comey Barrett, and Roberts, in spite of bipartisan, professional and religious condemnation of conversion practices. Even some former "ex-gay" advocates have weighed in against conversion therapy:

"We once believed that there was something morally wrong and psychologically 'broken' about being LGBTQ. We know better now. We once believed that sexual orientation or gender identity were somehow chosen or could be changed. We know better now. We once thought it was impossible to embrace our sexual orientation or gender identity as an intrinsic, healthy part of who we are and who we were created to be. We know better now...

"In light of this, we now stand united in our conviction that conversion therapy is not 'therapy,' but is instead both ineffective and harmful. We align ourselves with every major mainstream professional medical and mental health organization in denouncing attempts to change sexual orientation or gender identity."

But we now live in a country where the conspiracy fabulists in charge of the nation's health care system have not merely freedom of speech but governmental imprimatur to say Tylenol causes autism, salmonella is good for you, and gender identity is a figment of your imagination. And any medical professional who disagrees is free to find other employment whether they want to or not.

And where a majority on the Supreme Court are free to prescribe the U.S. Constitution some conversion therapy into Project 2025.

Jagged Little April

Today's Graphical History Tour continues rummaging through the dusty files of cartoons from my salad, appetizer, and cheese course days.

Last week's GHT left off with a cartoon marking the tenth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, so let's start off with this cartoon marking the twentieth.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 20, 1995

My cartoon was an homage to the famous one by David Levine of LBJ showing off his appendicitis scar. I was  commenting that we were still arguing over what the lessons of Vietnam were. Did we need to stop getting involved in domestic disputes overseas? Or was the problem that we failed to commit to overwhelming force?

It was a debate the U.S. was having in the absence of an International Communist Threat. The fall of the Soviet Union was supposed to herald the End of History, whatever that meant; yet our supposed Peace Dividend had already been partly spent in the the former Yugoslavia and in Haiti.

One of my highly respected colleagues cast some shade last week on editorial cartoons that pay homage to classic editorial cartoons. I'm as guilty of that as anyone (I'll note that he and I have both ripped off Bill Mauldin's Weeping Lincoln cartoon). I guess if there is a rule about such things, it is to avoid copying someone else's idea that is already an overexposed meme on the internets.

I say that as someone who once cartooned Bill Clinton as a bunch of dancing screensaver babies.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 13, 1995

Sticking with April of 1995 for a moment but turning to a local issue: Milwaukee Aldermen Dan Schramm and Tom Nardelli objected to the Common Council settling a lawsuit by the family of Konerak Sinthasomphone to the tune of $850,000. Sinthasomphone was the 14-year-old Laotian-American boy returned to Jeffrey Dahmer's clutches by police officers Joseph Gabrish and John Balcerzak on May 27, 1991.

Schramm blamed Dahmer's victim for having put himself in danger, and Nardelli cast aspersions on his parents. We'll never know why Konerak didn't keep his distance from the man still on parole for drugging and sexually assaulting Konerak’s older brother; we do know why Gabrish and Balcerzak chose to believe the white serial killer rather than the Asian boy with a hole drilled through his skull or the Black women who called the police for help.

Can't we talk about something more pleasant?

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, April 8, 2005

Jumping ahead to April of 2005, here's another local issue cartoon. Sort of. 

Before getting into the topic of the cartoon, I just want to point out that I spent a lot of time and effort drawing in black around all that verbiage on the chalkboard. The verbiage isn't white-out, or white ink, or gesso, it's all absence of black ink. Oh, sure, I could have simply filled the space with black in Photoshop and superimposed the repeated sentence in Comic Sans. But we here at Bergetoons honor our commitment to bring you only the highest quality, hand-crafted cartoonistry.

I drew this cartoon before our present government made white supremacy official policy and DEI a dirty word. The editorial page of the Business Journal (at least twenty years ago), like Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton, was quite in favor of promoting diversity on corporate boards, and this character appeared in several of my cartoons accompanying those editorials. 

Here's an earlier cartoon featuring the the fictional board of Gibson, Gibsen, Ibsen and Gibbs:

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, June 13, 2003

No Photoshop cut-and-paste in that cartoon, either.

Moving on to April, 2015:

for Q Syndicate, April, 2015

About all that stuff I said about handcrafted artisanal cartoonistry and being above filling drawings in Photoshop, um, just forget that.

Once I decided that I needed to start sending out cartoons in living color, there was no way I was going to draw two versions of every cartoon: one in color and one in grayscale. Nope, nuh-uh! All the colorizing for one and halftones in the other is done in Photoshop to one black-and-white scan of one drawing.

This cartoon followed an early morning incident in March in which an unidentified man dressed in a construction suit tried to enter the White House grounds through the gate at Pennsylvania Avenue, but was stopped by Uniformed Division officers and taken into custody. Also that April, a man who had jumped the north fence onto the White House lawn in July pleaded guilty to trespassing on restricted grounds.

More seriously, the previous September, an Iraq War veteran named Omar Gonzalez had made it all the way into the White House through the North Portico doors, where he overpowered a Secret Service officer. He ran through most of the main floor before getting tackled by a counter-assault agent. He was later sentenced to seventeen months in prison.

That’s it for another Graphical History Tour. Please return your seats and tray tables to the upright position, and remain seated until history comes to a complete stop.

Q Toon: The Great Right North

Here's a lede U.S. conservatives are very unlikely to match any time soon:

Conservatives led the charge in Canada's Parliament to vote to ban conversion therapy for minors.

The Senate voted without any objections on the bill proposed by Conservative Senator Leo Housakos and fast-tracked through all legislative stages December 7. Previously, the House of Commons voted unanimously to pass the bill brought forward by Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole, who has become a proponent of LGBTQ rights since becoming head of the party. O'Toole allowed his party to have a free vote on the issue.

In an unusual occurrence, conservatives voted in agreement with their liberal counterparts.

"The community has been heard," Housakos said in the Senate, reported the Toronto Star.

"It was heard by the House of Commons and we saw the House of Commons do the right thing and pass this piece of legislation unanimously and they did so because they thought it was in the national interest to do so," Housakos continued.

The Senate's passage of the bill requires royal assent from the Governor General or her designate for it to become law, reported the paper.

Assuming that Joe Manchin is not the Governor General of Canada, it looks good for Canada to become the sixth nation to ban conversion therapy, which uses psychological, physical, or spiritual pressure to convert a patient's sexual orientation or gender identity.

20 states and the District of Columbia ban conversion therapy, and there are restrictions in five more. In Wisconsin, for example, while conversion therapy on minors isn't illegal, an executive order by Governor Evers prohibits use of state funds for it. Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, on the other hand, have brought suit in federal court to prevent local governments from enforcing their own bans.

It's mighty difficult to imagine any more than a scattered few U.S. Republicans casting any pro-LGBTQ votes, incurring the vengeful wrath of the right-wing rage machine and the televangelicabal. So let's hear it for the brave and principled conservatives of our neighbor to the north!

Cu-roo-coo-coo-coo-coo-coo-coo!

Q Toon: Whoops for Wholeness

The Conversion Therapy scam lost another one of its founding fathers this summer. Hope for Wholeness founder McKrae Game publicly apologized on Facebook and in an interview with the (Charleston, South Carolina) Post and Courier this month for the damage the quack ministry had caused countless already conflicted and vulnerable gays and lesbians.

“Conversion therapy is not just a lie, but it’s very harmful, because it’s false advertising. ... I was a religious zealot that hurt people,” Game said in an interview. “People said they attempted suicide over me and the things I said to them. People, I know, are in therapy because of me. Why would I want that to continue?”

While condemning Wellness for Hope's practices, McKrae nevertheless believes that its Baptist construct could somehow serve as a community for people who believe “homosexuality is incongruent with their faith.” The Post and Courier article includes this response from a dissatisfied Hope for Wholeness client:

Josh Crocker, 32, a Greenville man who is gay and sought counsel from Hope for Wholeness as a college student in 2006 (known then as Truth Ministry), said that particular sentiment was troubling. There is no part of Hope for Wholeness, he added, that could be of benefit to anybody.
“For me, I just think that’s inadequate. ... I think he should be afforded the time and space to process all the things he needs to process and become who he is,” Crocker said in an interview, “but I’d love for him to apply that same passion he had for Hope for Wholeness ... to advocacy for the LGBTQ community ... and to dismantle conversion therapy and ex-gay ministries.”

Game founded Truth Ministry in 1999, after having "lived as a gay man for three years," according to the Hope for Wellness website. Now 51, he was fired from the program in 2017 and publicly declared himself gay this past June.

Game is hardly the only LGBTQ conversion therapist to discover that self-loathing is no way to live one's life. Sadly, the determination to force themselves to live heterosexual lives has left scores of ruined marriages in its wake.

[Mormon and conversion therapy advocate David] Matheson then confirmed [conversion therapy advocate Rich] Wyler’s assertions on Tuesday with a Facebook post of his own. “A year ago I realized I had to make substantial changes in my life. I realized I couldn’t stay in my marriage any longer. And I realized that it was time for me to affirm myself as gay,” he wrote.
Matheson, who was married to a woman for 34 years and is now divorced, also confirmed in an interview with NBC News that he is now dating men.

There was also ex-gay poster boy John Paulk, who appeared on the cover of Newsweek with his wife Anne back in August of 1998, only to transfer the prefix "ex-" from his gayness to his wife. Love in Action leader John Smid (the basis for the character of conversion therapist Victor Sykes in "Boy Erased") tried for 24 years to make a go of his mixed-sex marriage before admitting that he was not heterosexual and had "never met a man who experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual." Exodus International former President Alan Manning Chambers is apparently still married to his wife Marilyn, but now identifies as gay and, like the others, has publicly apologized to the LGBTQ community.

In spite of all this, and several states and cities officially banning conversion therapy, the ex-gay Christianist movement is reportedly making a comeback, according to the Washington Post. Jonathan Merritt interviewed for his report one new-wave ex-gay leader after another — Rosaria Champaigne Butterfield, Jackie Hill Perry, Matt Moore — who has married or become engaged to an opposite sex partner.

No doubt those couples will be very happy together.

✍

I've arranged the four panels of this week's cartoon in one column as an experiment in making multi-panel cartoons legible on teeny tiny phone screens. It wasn't drawn to accommodate the format, and I'm not particularly pleased with the result.

And that's as far as I'm willing to go. You want to read cartoons on your smart watch? Sorry, Dick Tracy.

Q Toon: The Brainwasher Brigade

As promised, today's cartoon marks the return of someone I haven't drawn in a long time. The current President of the United States hasn't shown up in one of my cartoons since way back in March of 2013 (and then, in a crowd -- see at right).

That I would go nearly two full years without cartooning President Obama only seems weird until one realizes that I draw mostly about people whom I am criticizing, and I tend to agree with Mr. Obama more often than not.

The occasion for this week's cartoon is the White House's response to an on-line petition to ban "conversion therapy," especially when it is imposed upon gay, lesbian and transgender youth by pressure from their parents, guardians, or clergy.

When assessing the validity of conversion therapy, or other practices that seek to change an individual’s gender identity or sexual orientation, it is as imperative to seek guidance from certified medical experts. The overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrates that conversion therapy, especially when it is practiced on young people, is neither medically nor ethically appropriate and can cause substantial harm.
As part of our dedication to protecting America’s youth, this Administration supports efforts to ban the use of conversion therapy for minors.

 

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q Syndicate✒Apr 16, 2015 EditorialCartoonists.com

Credit for the White House response actually belongs to Valerie Jarrett, by the way. But I've gone this long without drawing any cartoons about Valerie Jarrett, and I'll probably make it through the rest of the Obama administration assuming that anything she puts on the White House blog has the full blessing of her boss.

The humor of the cartoon works better this way, anyway.