My, My, July

We've got more stuff from the Bergetoons vault in today's Graphical History Tour. 

You'll have to pardon me for indulging in rehashing my own cartoons three Saturdays in a row; in my defense, we had two prominent Senators knocking on death's door this month, and I didn't find much inspiration in cartoons published 100 Julys ago. "Oliphant's Presidents" has already been done (although I suppose I could have tried putting an "Oliphant's Vice Presidents" thing together).  

1986

in NorthCountry Journal, Poynette Wis., July 1986

The cartoons I drew for the NorthCountry Journal directly reflected the editorials in each monthly issue. This one had to do with 44 Wisconsin conservation clubs joining with the Wildlife Legislative Fund of America, a pro-hunting lobbying group, to "defeat the anti-hunting movement before it defeats us," according to WLFA chair Jim Glass. 

The NorthCountry Journal reported that the WLFA was funded by grants from Woodstream Corporation (makers of Victor traps), the fur industry, the Mellon Foundation, and national sportsmen organizations.

The WLFA had chosen Wisconsin as the pilot program for its "Protect What's Right" campaign because "if it doesn't fly in Wisconsin, it's not going to fly at all," said Glass, a Rockwell International executive from Columbus, Ohio. Wisconsin has a very strong and long-standing hunting tradition; I don't recall it ever being a hotbed of anti-hunting legislation. 

In fact, the legislation I do recall includes a 2003 constitutional amendment guaranteeing right to hunt and fish.

1996

"Our Problem" in Journal Times, Racine Wis., July 7, 1996

This cartoon expands on an neighbors' successful fight to block a proposed halfway house for offenders who had served their prison sentence (see the unpublished local cartoon posted back in May), as well as Racine taxpayers' objection to a .1% sales tax in Milwaukee and adjacent counties to help pay for the Brewers' new baseball stadium. The stadium tax had prompted a recall of a Republican member of the State Senate from Racine, which would result in flipping the State Senate to a Democratic majority.

The upscale North Bay neighborhood was up in arms against having a home for developmentally challenged adults nearby, successfully blocking that proposal, too. Complaints against property taxes funding the public schools coming from retirees whose children had graduated has been a never ending constant as far back as I can remember.

A letter to the editor responding to my cartoon argued a distinction between schools and the halfway homes on the one hand and the baseball stadium on the other. "Homes for the mentally retarded, prisons, and schools are all public problems," Annette Richie wrote. "Baseball is a private enterprise and should not be subsidized by citizens' tax dollars."

It's an argument with merit, but without a successful track record.

By the way, every little bit of that cartoon, including the diagonal line shading, I drew by hand. So don't give me that "AI Is Art, Too" crap.

2006

July, 2006

So now we turn from the local stuff to the gay stuff.

You wouldn't know it these days, but July used to be a lull in the news cycle. I can't recall whether I drew this cartoon in response to any specific gay celebrity getting caught with his pants down, or if I came up with it when there wasn't anything current in the news to draw about.

This was before Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) got arrested for lewd conduct in a rest room at the Twin Cities International Airport, after which late night comedians were guaranteed a laugh by citing the airport or inserting the words "wide stance" in a punch line. Years earlier, George Michael's public loo escapades had been fodder for fallback punch lines.

2016

July, 2016

I drew this cartoon a little too late for most LGBTQ Pride events. A number of Pride parades in the U.S. and Canada had been disrupted by protesters from within our community who objected to other the inclusion of certain other LGBTQ subgroups.

Toronto Pride had assigned the lead spot in their parade to the local Black Lives Matter group, which returned the favor by blocking the parade, setting off multi-colored smoke bombs, and refusing to move until a list of demands was met, including the removal of police from the parade ‒ both as participants and as protection.

The subgroups mentioned in later panels have not, so far as I know, gone quite so far as to disrupt Pride parades in progress. The objections raised by Palestinian, Jewish, animal rights activist, anti-corporate, and anti-religious LGBTQ groups, however, have been real. 

The overt hostility and persecution by Republicans running state and federal government has probably tempered any such controversies this year — except for either side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.

Not that everything went smoothly this year. Police aggressively attacked people in Philadelphia's Gayborhood during that city's Pride festival. https://epgn.com/2026/06/09/community-responds-to-gayborhood-police-presence-pride/

Dallas Pride Board officials have been accused of embezzling funds and financial mismanagement

sponsors withdrawing support https://blog.presspassq.gay/2026/07/pride-celebrations-marred-by-controversies-cuts-in-funding.html

Victoria Day's Sneak Peek

There were topics I would dearly have loved to draw about this week but didn't because ideas stubbornly refused to gel.

I sketched out a memorial cartoon for Jason Collins, the gay basketball player who came out of the closet in Sports Illustrated in May of 2013 and succumbed to stage 4 glioblastoma on May 12 of this year at age 47. But I couldn't come up with anything besides a caricature that I wasn't entirely happy with — no trenchant quotation or iconic photo image — and I certainly was not about to draw a basketball shedding a tear.

Then there is a local story that I thought would be worthy of a cartoon for a national, if niche, audience: the school board in Watertown, Wisconsin, voted 7-to-1 to stop their high school's Wind Symphony from performing "A Mother of a Revolution!" by Omar Thomas at their spring concert this evening. Thomas wrote the instrumental piece as "a celebration of the bravery of trans women, and in particular, Marsha 'Pay It No Mind' Johnson. Marsha is credited with being one of the instigators of the famous Stonewall uprising of June 28, 1969..."

It's a technically demanding work, but the hours of practice those kids in Watertown spent mastering the music were all for naught when the school board decreed that it violated the district's "controversial issues" policy. Board Vice President Sam Ouweneel called the board's action “a perfect example of what everyone here ran on, which was ending indoctrination and radical curriculum.”

Watertown students staged a walk-out protest that was duly reported on state television news. Someone with sympathies for the school board complained that the coverage was all one-sided, so one TV station sent a reporter and cameraman out to the board members' homes to offer them opportunity to comment. None of them would answer the door.

Over the weekend, the owner of Minocqua Brewing Company invited the Waterford Wind Symphony to perform "A Mother of a Revolution!" at the biergarten he is sponsoring in Madison this coming weekend. He soon realized that the band's director could be in trouble with the school board were he to participate, but the invitation to the band stands.

The guy in Minocqua is a leftwing gadfly perpetually in trouble with the Republicans in charge of Minocqua city government over zoning and licensing type issues. He has declared his candidacy for Wisconsin governor as a Democrat, to which the Democratic establishment has responded, "Gee, thanks, but we have enough candidates already." 

To give you an idea of the sort of person he is, he has publicly promised that his brewery will host a "Free Beer Day" when Donald Trump kicks the bucket. After the latest assassination attempt, he posted "Well, we almost got #freebeerday. Either a brother or sister in the Resistance needs to work on their marksmanship or he faked another assassination to get a positive news cycle."

All of which seemed like a lot to cram into a cartoon for readers who may not have heard of any of this. So I ended up drawing about something else very late last night.

I Guano Wish You a Merry Christmas

Hi there! You're just in time to join another Graphical History Tour through the archives of your humble scribbler's December cartoons, carefully aged in our ancient wine cellar, each evidencing floral legs with notes of winter stone leather and an earthy finish.

2015

First off, let's get into the spirit of the season with a couple of classic Christmas movies.

We watch a fair number of classic movies in this household, especially at this time of year. After a while, the plots do seem to get mixed up in my head. Did we just witness a miracle on 34th Street, or did it happen on Fifth Avenue?

One thing that I've always liked about parodying old movies like this is that I don't have to spend the usual time making separate grayscale and full-color versions for syndication. Nope, just save the grayscale version, convert it to CMYK, fill in the pink triangle, and voilá! The colorized version is already finished!

Which reminds me, I think tonight we're watching Dudley the Angel show up to help Charlie Brown find the true meaning of Christmas in Frosty, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

2005

Speaking of whom...

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, Dec. 9, 2005

Do I remember the point of the editorial this cartoon was meant to illustrate? No way. It had something to do with corporations securing "air rights" above ground level for such things as skyways connecting buildings on opposite sides of a street. 

That was the fourth-to-last cartoon of mine in the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee. At the end of the year, they decided that they didn't want to run cartoons on the editorial page any more, in favor of a weekly thumbs-up / thumbs-down listicle.

I got more appreciation from the Chicago Free Press that December, which used a cartoon of mine on the front page of their year-in-review edition.

in Chicago Free Press, December, 2005

The Chicago Free Press was a client of my cartoons for their entire run, from 1999 to 2010; this caricature of Dubya Bush was actually from a cartoon I had drawn in August, 2003.

1995

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., Dec. 21, 1995

Christmas week does generally not suit itself to cartoons about the beach hereabouts.  

The city had hired an expert from the National Water Research Institute to determine the source of  fecal coliform bacteria that had forced the city to close North Beach several times during the summer. Human feces were the prime suspect, but in December, the expert reported that preliminary studies pointed instead to gull droppings.

Dad was on the Racine Board of Health back then, and still is, so I get the inside poop on any matters related to public health here. And yes, gull droppings have been a factor in beach closings: they crap on the sand, and that stuff washes into Lake Michigan when it rains.

But human shit was also a major part of the problem. As a result, Racine extended its sewage outflow further out into the lake. The study cast much of the blame on Milwaukee's sewage system; during heavy rains, untreated sewage had to be released into the lake in order to minimize it backing up into everyone's basements.

Since then, Milwaukee's Big Tunnel project has largely addressed that particular problem. This past summer, Racine only had to close North Beach one time (but did have to issue advisories on two other occasions).

1985

I had drawn a couple Christmas issue cover cartoons for the University of Wisconsin at Parkside student newspaper by 1985, making oversized editorial cartoons for them. With the 1985 edition, I decided to make a simple, straightforward holiday greeting.

in UW-P Ranger, Somers Wis., Dec. 12, 1985

I also departed from usual by drawing exclusively in charcoal. This meant I couldn't erase anything if I didn't like it, and having to be extremely careful not to smudge the drawing. The original drawing is too large for my scanner; if I could have posted the original drawing here, you would be able to see all the blue pencil underneath the charcoal.

The medium of charcoal did not afford the Ranger editors much opportunity to add color to the drawing. This was well before PhotoShop and other quick and easy artistic tools; to add color, someone would have had to lay a halftone transfer sheet over the drawing and cut with an Exacto knife the desired shapes for each area where the color should print.

I  had created the Ranger flag that year, and every shape you see in green, I made using that same halftone cutting process. (Ignore the yellow; that's just the discoloring of 40-year-old newsprint, or however old it was when the UW-P library scanned it. I Photoshopped out the yellowing from the Peace on Earth drawing for this post, but not from the flag.)

Well, heck, why don't we go back yet another ten Decembers just for gits and shiggles?

1975

in Park Beacon, Dec. 19, 1975

That takes us all the way back to my high school days. This cartoon was something I drew to illustrate someone else's (possibly Executive Editor Joel Krein's) Twelve Days of Christmas list.

The principal surrounded by garbage, and the school nurse, by the way, were caricatures of real persons. And I'm quite sure that none of my fellow students caught the reference to a running gag in "Fibber McGee & Molly," a radio comedy that was well before our time. Before Assistant Principal McKee's time, too.

Somehow, the school administration let us get away with this cartoon. If I remember correctly, the Park Beacon had to yield to administration censorship once in the two years that I was on staff. An installment of Kevin Cacciotti's "Being Cool in School" comic strip included advice to "destroy school property," and Principal Thompson made us black the cartoon out of every copy with magic markers.

Except for the copies we saved for ourselves.

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Well, that's the Graphical History Tour for this week. Thanks for coming along, and have a Merry St. Lucy's Day!

Q Toon: Sic Transit Veritas

I figured it was time to put out a back-to-school cartoon this week.

With the new semester, the ham-fisted drive to impose the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime's fascist agenda on academia will certainly resume. Some of our most respected universities, fearful of losing government research grants and tuition assistance, have already bent the knee to the Mar-a-Lago Mussolini, whose demands will only increase and get worse.

Has your board or regents shuttered your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness office? Good. Now scuttle your environmental studies program, drop your epidemiology research, and cancel your unAmerican foreign language courses. Clear your history and literature curricula with the Ministry of Truth Social, and while you're at it, His Excellency Donald The First Of His Name would appreciate an honorary degree. One or two of those Distinguished Chair Things in his name would be nice, too. Gilded, naturally.

I suspect, however, that college students being young and idealistic will not knuckle under to Trump's brand of authoritarianism as readily as their elders. Last year's protests against genocide of Palestinians are likely to resume — or perhaps the spark will be ICE abduction of the cafeteria ladies, or the arrest of a tenured professor who had the temerity to suggest that slavery was racist, or a transgender athlete being whisked off to reeducation camp.

My fear is that sooner or later, as red-state National Guard troops are called in to restore rightthink and order, some campus will witness a repeat of Kent State.

I'm referring, my matriculating friends, not to the university, but to a tragedy your professors may be too young to remember. Look it up before your library and the internet get expurgated: it can happen here.

Q Toon: Parental Rights and Wrongs

The Supreme Court wrapped up its work for the litigation season at the end of June, its 6-to-3 right-wing supermajority handing down a thoroughly predictable series of rulings in support of Trumpster goodthink.

Of interest and disappointment to the LGBTQ+ community, the Court ruled in Mahmoud v. Taylor in favor of a group of parents who demanded to exempt their children from exposure to LGBTQ+ history and literature. The Muslim, Ukrainian Orthodox, and Catholic litigants had sued the Montgomery County, Maryland, school board to provide alternative curricula for their children. 

The dispute stems from the county school board’s 2022 approval of books featuring LGBTQ+ characters for use in its language-arts curriculum. One book, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, tells the story of a little girl’s reaction to her uncle’s same-sex wedding; another book, Pride Puppy, describes a puppy that becomes lost during a Pride parade. 

The county initially allowed parents to excuse their children from instruction using the LGBTQ-themed storybooks. When the county removed that option in 2023, several parents went to federal court.

Writing for the majority, Dubya-appointed Justice Samuel Alito “what the parents seek here is not the right to micromanage the public school curriculum, but rather to have their children opt out of a particular educational requirement that burdens their well-established right ‘to direct ‘the religious upbringing’ of their children.’”

Clinton nominee Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, countered that the Court's grant of a parental right to veto LGBTQ+-positive public school curriculum materials on religious grounds could mean that “books on evolution and interfaith marriage, and history may be next.”

It's easy to imagine that today's Court majority would have no problem with that.

Meanwhile, the Supremes declined to rule whether parental rights exist outside of their religious rights. In U.S. v. Skrmetti, the Court ruled Tennessee's SB1 (the number indicating it was the state senate's most urgent business this session) banning medical care for transgender minors, even against the wishes of patient, parents, and medical professionals.

No, parents: you and your transgender child have no say in the child's health care. That is up to the State. No opt-out for you.

The plaintiffs had tried to argue that Skrmetti was about gender discrimination: e.g., a minor the state identifies as male could be prescribed hormone blockers, but a minor the state identifies as female cannot. Chief Justice John Roberts rejected that argument, because the second patient is being discriminated against for being transgender, not for being female, and that's okay.

Influence of Skrmetti has already begun to spread to other transgender concerns. The Seventh Circuit vacated its prior rulin g against anti-trans bathroom policies in public schools. The Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits have been instructed to review two decisions involving Medicaid exclusions for gender-affirming medical care, one involving public teachers health insurance plans, and one involving birth certificate policies.

If nobody can come up with a religious liberty argument in favor of transgender medical care, health insurance coverage, and lavatory use, perhaps, my cartoon character suggests, someone could at least raise a faith-based objection to the State mandating who The Lord Your God is.

But I suspect the theocrats on the Court would find some excuse to find reason to infringe that particular religious exercise.

Q Toon: Texas Senate Bill 12

Florida notwithstanding...

There's a lot to be upset about this LGBTQ+ Pride Month, and a Texas-sized amount of shame is coming from the Lone Star State:

Senate Bill 12, authored by Sen. Brandon Creighton, won final legislative passage Saturday after lawmakers in both chambers adopted the conference committee reports that specifically clarified that schools will be banned from authorizing or sponsoring student clubs based on sexual orientation or gender identity. ...

Rep. Gene Wu, D-Houston, emphasized that these clubs exist because of a long history of oppression against the LGBTQ+ community. He warned against demonizing students and teachers for discussing gender and sexuality.

“The real monsters are not kids trying to figure out who they are,” Wu said during the House discussion. “The monsters are not the teachers who love them and encourage them and support them. They are not the books that provide them with some amount of comfort and information. The real monsters are here.”

Lawmakers shared personal stories about LGBTQ+ youth. Rep. Rafael Anchía said his daughter was a vice president of a pride club at her school. He stressed that these clubs “are no more about sex than 4-H or ROTC or the basketball team.” ...

Anchía also told the Texas Tribune he “didn’t sign up for five anti-LGBT bills this session.”

Those bills include one denying transgender Texans the right to have accurate, up-to-date identification in state documents. HB 229 has passed both houses of the Texas legislature and is certain to be signed into law by transphobic Governor Greg Abbott.

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If I had read more than the initially cursory reporting Sunday of the fatal shooting death of actor Jonathan Joss in San Antonio, that might very well have been the topic of my cartoon this week instead of SB 12. It hasn't received quite the media attention the attacks in Boulder and Washington D.C. have, but it should.

Joss, 59, was the voice of King of the Hill character John Redcorn, and portrayed Wamapoke Chief Ken Hotate on Parks and Recreation. The Native American was openly gay, and had married his husband, Tristan Kern de Gonzalez, on Valentines Day this year.

The two have been subjected to years of homophobic and transphobic threats (Tristan is a transman),  duly reported to San Antonio law enforcement, but to no avail. Those included threats to burn down their house, a threat which someone appears to have carried out on January 23, resulting in the deaths of their three dogs.

On Sunday, June 1, the Joss-Kerns returned to their destroyed home to pick up any mail, and found the skull and harness of one of the dogs prominently displayed there. From de Gonzalez's statement on Redcorn's Facebook page:

"This caused both of us severe emotional distress. We began yelling and crying in response to the pain of what we saw.

"While we were doing this a man approached us. He started yelling violent homophobic slurs at us. He then raised a gun from his lap and fired.

"Jonathan and I had no weapons. We were not threatening anyone. We were grieving. We were standing side by side. When the man fired Jonathan pushed me out of the way. He saved my life."

A neighbor, Sigfredo Ceja Alvarez, 56, has been arrested and charged with Joss's murder. Astonishingly, however, the San Antonio Police Department has since announced that in spite of the history of harassment complaints, the likely arson, the cruel display of the dog's remains, and the unprovoked attack, they don't believe that this obvious hate crime is a hate crime.

“Our investigation has found no evidence whatsoever to indicate that the Mr. Joss’s murder was related to his sexual orientation. We take such allegations very seriously and have thoroughly reviewed all available information. Should any new evidence come to light, we will charge the suspect accordingly.”

Given that the alleged murderer is named Sigfredo Ceja Alvarez and not Buford T. Redneck IV, one assumes that the Texas justice system will result in a conviction and prison sentence — if not deportation to a concentration camp in El Salvador or Libya — even without a hate crime penalty attached.

Unless, of course, the case ends in a mistrial because Joss's widower identifies himself under oath as Tristan Kern de Gonzalez rather than his deadname.

Hold My Hand And I'll Take You There

Welcome aboard today's Graphical History Tour, offering a self-serving selection of my own cartoons from Mays in years ending in -five.

Since Grifter-in-Chief Donald Frequent Flyer Trump has just returned from the Arabian peninsula with his very own private pleasure dome in the sky, our first stop is deep in the heart of Texas, twenty years ago:

for Q Syndicate, May, 2005

Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah visited President George W. Bush at his Crawford Ranch (in April, actually), and Americans were taken aback seeing our president holding the crown prince's hand as they walked to Casa de Dubya.

This was less than four years after 9/11, and it was well known that several of the terrorists who took over the planes were Saudi nationals. But the Bush administration had committed to overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and needed acquiescence of the other powers in the region.

It Abdullah, who reigned as the Saudi King from August, 2005 until his death in January of 2015, is an uncle of the present Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. 

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., May 2, 1985

Skipping back another twenty years: West Wing staffers regard meetings with foreign heads of state as an opportunity to burnish a president's stature as a world leader. But even carefully planned events can misfire.

President Ronald Reagan had come under criticism after a meeting of the G-7 in West Germany. To mark the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, Chancellor Helmut Kohl persuaded Reagan aides to schedule a side trip to a cemetery in Bitburg where some 2,000 German soldiers were buried. Reagan's Deputy Chief of Staff made a preliminary visit to the cemetery in February, where he failed to notice 49 grave markers for members of the Waffen-SS.

Politicians and Jewish leaders in Europe and the U.S. urged Reagan to cancel the Bitburg trip; instead the White House added a stop at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to Reagan's itinerary. A spokesman for children of Holocaust survivors, Menachem Rosensaft, spoke for those not mollified: “By entering Bitburg, [Reagan and Kohl] desecrate the memory of all those who were murdered by the SS, and of all those whom they pretended to commemorate here at Belsen.”

By the way, the "584" marker by my signature was my mistake. May is kind of late to still be writing the previous year on cartoons, checks, and other documents — especially since I didn't have old age as an excuse forty years ago.

Let's come forward to 1995 and some domestic issues:

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, May 4, 1995

Politicians have been telling us for more than thirty years that Medicare and Social Security are heading to hell in a handbasket. The Republican plan has been to get rid of them entirely without getting rid of them at all — basically by making the benefits from them smaller and smaller and more difficult to get.

At the same time, they stoke seniors' resentment of paying taxes for schools well after their own children have walked away with diplomas funded by senior citizens of earlier generations.

for bergetoons.blogspot.com, the internet, May, 2015

Jumping ahead to May of 2015, we return to the Lone Star State, where conspiracy fabulists were all hot and bothered about a U.S. Army training exercise called "Jade Helm" — which apparently enlisted Walmart basements in a secret government plot to overthrow the government of Texas. Accordingly, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor and report the nefarious activities of them darn Yankees.

At the same time, the Texas legislature passed a law preventing localities from regulating fracking, but what is really at issue here is this: Governor Abbott has had ten fracking years to get to the bottom of this "Jade Helm" conspiracy, most of them with the full backing and support of Republicans and Qanoncompoops in charge of the federal government.

And somehow he has failed to reveal anything about the Jade Helm Conspiracy.

Which can only mean one thing: Texas Governor Greg Abbott is himself part of the Jade Helm Conspiracy to overthrow the government of Texas!

More on this story as it continues failing to develop.

Monkey Business

Hey, Graphical History Tourists! Today’s Silverback Saturday post is about something you’ve actually heard about!

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial, and nobody a century ago was more delighted than the nation’s editorial cartoonists.

"Grandpa on Trial" by Douglas Rodgers in Sacramento Bee, May 19, 1925

The trial pitted William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic Party nominee for President and a favorite subject for editorial cartoonists, against Clarence Darrow, a high-profile labor lawyer famous for his defense of thrill murderers Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Loeb in "the trial of the century" one year previous.

Bryan would not be at home in today's Democratic Party: a staunch advocate for Prohibition and of blurring the separation of church and state, he had waged a national campaign against the teaching of evolution.

"He Thinks He's the Defendant on Trial" by J.P. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, May 31, 1925

In March, the Tennessee legislature had passed the "Butler Act," named for State Representative John Washington Butler, a farmer and head of the World Christian Fundamentals Association. The Butler Act  outlawed the teaching of the theory of evolution, or "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." in public schools, colleges, and universities receiving state funding.

"Fe, Fi, Fo, Fist..." by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 21, 1925

Bryan publicly thanked Tennessee Governor Austin Peay for signing the Butler Act into law, saying, "The Christian parents of the state owe you a debt of gratitude for saving their children from the poisonous influence of an unproven hypothesis."

"Damming the Streamlet and Loosing the Torrent" by Ed LeCocq in Des Moines Register, May 22, 1925

(In an unfortunate editing decision, LeCocq's cartoon happened to run immediately alongside a headline about a boy fatally drowned after falling from a dam.)

"He Put Us on the Map" by Edmund Duffy in Baltimore Sun, May 25, 1925

The trial of John T. Scopes, a 24-year-old high school science and math teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was not a case of the state singling out and persecuting a principled teacher minding his own business. 

Scopes was in fact recruited by the publicity-seeking manager of a financially struggling coal and iron company in Dayton, the county superintendent of schools, and an attorney to test the new law on the grounds that state law also required teaching from a textbook, Civic Biology: Presented in Problems by George William Hunter. Hunter's book explained and endorsed the theory of evolution; a biology teacher could therefore be in violation of Tennessee law whether he taught the theory of evolution or not.

"Listening In" by Bill Sykes in Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, May/June, 1925

Charges were filed against Scopes on May 5, but there is actually some doubt as to whether he ever actually taught students the theory of evolution in the first place. He coached three students to testify in preliminary proceedings that he had, and he was formally indicted on May 25. 

"At Work" by Grover Page in Louisville Courier-Journal, May 12, 1925

We here at Graphical History Tour Central promise to keep you updated on this broken news a century after it develops.

In the meantime, gratuler med syttende mai!

Skøl!

This Week's Sneak Peek

 You thought I was going to give this guy a pass?

On a totally unrelated matter:

I heard from a teacher in Georgia after last week's mass shooting at Apalachee High School that her school had received a bomb threat. Students and staff were told to evacuate the building.

Then the school administrators told teachers to go back in and search for anything that might be a bomb.

Think about that for a moment.

Clearly the school administrators didn't.

Think of your children's school teachers, and think back on any of your own. How many of them had any training in explosives detection? How many of them would be able to find a bomb hidden who knows where in a school building without setting it off?

Well, that's Miss Othmar all over.

Q Toon: Do Not Disturb

Red state colleges are welcoming students back to campus by emptying their libraries of books about feminism, LGBTQ+ experience, African-American and other minority studies, and anything else reeking of social justice. Students returning to New College in Florida last week discovered waste receptacles overflowing onto the ground with such books. 

University of Kentucky President Eli Capilauto also announced this week that UK has disbanded its Diversity office. This after he had criticized anti-DEI lawmakers in February, arguing, "Let’s not extinguish the thirst for knowledge because certain questions aren’t allowed because they are uncomfortable or challenging."

Elsewhere, George Mason University, Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Wyoming are among the other institutions of higher learning that have knuckled under to the demands of politicians who have decreed diversity, equity, and inclusion to be anathema. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are now literally thought crimes in Texas, Iowa, Idaho, Utah, and Kansas.

Those of you who know me know that I do not use the word "literally" figuratively.

Even private enterprise is succumbing to Republican Cancel Culture. Tractor Supply, John Deere, and Harley-Davidson have broken ties with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and announced that they will would strike any "socially motivated content" from their employee training materials. So I guess I won't need my Harley-Davidson tee shirts any more.

Not that little old me would be able to dissuade the farm equipment companies from chasing those lucrative red-state contracts to haul all those academic books and their dangerous ideas to landfills.

Q Toon: Is This a Dad Joke?

The buzz around Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, now that he's been tapped by Vice President Kamala Harris to take over her job in 2025, is that he has that "Midwestern Dad Vibe."

For the last few days, those who know him personally have been sharing their stories, including how helpful he’s been with fixing other people’s cars, how much of a delight he was in a decade-long group chat called “Sports Buddies,” and how inspiring he was as a teacher and coach. One former coworker told a story to the Washington Post in which they tried to prank him by giving Walz a fake gift certificate for a free turkey at the local grocery store, and that Walz managed to still leave with a free turkey. “That’s just Tim Walz,” she said.

At the turn of the millennium, Walz and his wife, Gwen, were faculty advisers to the Gay-Straight Student Alliance at Mankato West High School in south central Minnesota. The future Congressman and Governor has said — I'm paraphrasing here — that he felt called to bring his straight-cred as the coach of the football team to the group.

As one former student put it, "Dare I say, there's a lot of toxic masculinity in the whole football team. And to see someone who was a football coach, but also saying, 'Hey, we're going to respect everyone. And I absolutely won't put up with any of that crap' — that was really bold."

Contrast that attitude with that of the Republican Veep-Wannabe, J.D. Vance. You might catch him in a dress; but that wasn't solidarity, it was cultural appropriation.

The Ohio senator opposed the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act, which codified same-sex marriage as the law of the land, and introduced legislation that would have banned gender-affirming care for trans youth at a federal level. He has also endorsed the notion that the existence of queer and trans people in public life is inherently predatory, writing on Twitter, now X, in 2022: “I’ll stop calling people ‘groomers’ when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualization of my children.”

Republicans are trying to attack Walz for signing a Minnesota bill guaranteeing families of transgender youth the right to pursue gender-affirming care. Their epithet for him, "Tampon Tim" for signing a bill okaying (not, it must be pointed out, mandating) feminine hygiene dispensers in boys' bathrooms, was meant as an insult, but Walz has embraced it as a badge of honor. 

Because, really now. If you are asked to think of all the dangerous things we need our kids protected from in public schools, tampons are way, way down the list.

Pride Cometh to North Pratt Falls

It's LGBTQet-al. Pride Month, so let's start today's Graphical History Tour with something in a lighter vein than Thursday's cartoon.

Q Syndicate, June, 2004

Here's a cartoon I drew in time for client publications' Pride Month issues in 2004 (meaning that I drew it in May, of course), observing that Gay Pride celebrations were no longer found exclusively in major metropolitan cities.

"Boy Meets Boy" was one of those "reality" TV shows — on Bravo if I remember correctly. A gay twist on "The Bachelor," the main contestant was presented with several potential male suitors to choose among — the catch being that some of them, unbeknownst to him, were straight.

I have no recollection who the geeky straight contestant was, whether he was the guy picked in the end, or whatever happened to him or anybody else connected with the show. And it's just as well.

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., June 18, 1984

Let's keep talking about sex, but step back 20 more years to 1984.

That year, the Racine Unified School Board voted to reject five recommended textbooks, including two sex education books for teenage readers. Married and Single Life and Living Today offered frank discussion of the sorts of questions real adolescents have about relationships, loving, and, yes, sex. Beyond "When a man and a woman love each other very much they share a special kiss and have a baby."

The ban ignited controversy between Racinians who believed that teens deserve access to books that deal frankly and honestly with sex, and others who believed that frank and honest discussion of sex should wait until after teens grow up, get married, share a special kiss, and have children of their own.

The very night after my cartoon appeared in the local newspaper, the school board voted to reverse the ban on the two sex ed books. But the board upheld their vote on rejecting three American history textbooks for supposed liberal bias. The Journal Times reported that board member Barbara Scott said the textbook flap could have been avoided if the board had had time to review the books.

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., June 14, 1994

Continuing with the local scene: Democrat Peter Barca was elected to Congress from Wisconsin's First Congressional District in 1993 to succeed Les Aspin, whom Bill Clinton had appointed Secretary of Defense. Aspin had represented the 1st CD since 1970, routinely trouncing his Republican challengers.

My crystal ball here proved faulty. Republican realtor Mark Neumann, who had narrowly lost the 1993 special election, won the rematch in the 1994 GOP wave. A series of Republicans have held the seat ever since, mostly with only token opposition whom the Democratic National Congressional Committee never lifted a finger to help.

In the meantime, Peter Barca went back to representing Kenosha in Madison, including six years as Assembly Minority Leader, before accepting Governor Tony Evers's appointment as Secretary of the Department of Revenue. This year, he's running for Congress again, hoping to unseat three-term incumbent Bryan Steil.

For the moment, the DNCC thinks that Steil might be vulnerable to a challenge. Unlike the other Democratic congressional candidates here since 1998, Barca has plenty of governmental experience — although heading the Department of Revenue is a point on his résumé that Republicans will be more eager to emphasize than he will.

June, 2014

And finally, I began sketching this cartoon ten Junes ago after Judge Barbara Crabb of the United States District Court, Western District of Wisconsin, ruled my state’s antigay “marriage amendment” unconstitutional. 

Before inking it, I saw that Wisconsin State Journal editorial cartoonist Phil Hands had published a similar cartoon of the sailor and miner shaking hands. He's syndicated throughout Wisconsin, whereas I haven't been published in my home state since InStep magazine folded in 2003. So I decided not to send this cartoon out to my editors at Q Syndicate, on the theory that few readers elsewhere would recognize the men on the Badger State flag.

But I inked, scanned, and colorized it anyway, and here it is again.

Q Toon: Graduation Exorcises

Much has been said about Kansas City Chiefs place kicker Harrison Butker's commencement address to the graduating class of Benedictine College, a small Roman Catholic college in Atchison, Kansas. 

You may not have heard of Benedictine College before now, or, for that matter, of Harrison Butker. Not much attention gets paid to NFL kickers, who spend most of the game on the sidelines — even though, to the bafflement of the rest of the world, Americans name our sport after the body part that only the kicker uses for anything other than running around. I mean, do you remember Ryan Longwell? Jan Stennerud? Morten Andersen?

Can you tell which of their names I misspelled?

So in case you somehow missed it, Butker, who after all did kick the winning field goals in Superbowls LVII and LVIII, warned the graduates against "dangerous gender ideologies," a slap at transgender persons. He also condemned LGBTQ+ Pride Month, celebrated every June since the raid on the Stonewall Inn, "as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values and media [which] all stem from the pervasiveness of disorder.”

For 20 minutes, Butker, a conservative Roman Catholic, went on and on railing against President Biden, ecumenical catholic leaders, and "the tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion." But most of the attention to his address was on his advice to women.

“I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.”

If Butker had balanced the message by exhorting the men in his audience to be just as excited about marriage and children — particularly if, as he described Mrs. Harrison Butker's experience, their career aspirations fail them — there might have been less uproar over his advice to the women who had devoted four years and incurred a lifelong student loan debt for the piece of paper the dean was about to hand them.

Butker's address was an echo of last year's commencement speaker, Leonard Leo, who told the class of 2023 that “modern-day barbarians, secularists, and bigots” are “determined to threaten and delegitimize individuals and institutions who refuse to pledge fealty to the woke idols of our age.” 

Well, what else would you expect from a graduation speech at a small Roman Catholic college?

Almost unremarked was Butker's swipe at a congressional bill to withhold federal funding from colleges and universities that don't restrict antisemitic speech. He didn't object to it on libertarian free speech grounds, or as a stand against the drive to label as antisemitic any criticism of Netanyahu's wholesale slaughter of Palestinian civilians, but because "stating something as basic as the Biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail.”

That's code for holding all Jewry responsible for Christ's crucifixion, a right-wing fundamentalist credo espoused by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and every pogrom since the Middle Ages in direct defiance of Luke 23:34.

So now there are some advocating for the Chiefs to fire Butker, much as the San Francisco 49ers dropped Colin Kaepernick for speaking up and kneeling down for his political views. But the 49ers were wrong then, and the Chiefs would be wrong, too. 

The NFL has published their disagreement with Harrison Butker's address, but defended his right to speak his mind. Even the antisemitic bit.

That, my friends, is what free speech is all about.

You are free, nay, welcome to disagree with him. 

And doing so is not "silencing," "threatening," or "delegitimizing" him. Yes, some on the Left are guilty of "cancel culture." Just as some on the right are guilty of "cancel legislation."

But I'll bet on Draft Kings, FanDuel, or anywhere else that as long as Mr. Butker keeps kicking field goals, he'll get to exercise his Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Speech until Mrs. Butker tells him to knock it off.

Q Toon: 86ing Title 9 Day 1

On the campaign trail last week, Donald Berzilius Trump joined the cabal of Republican governors threatening to undo President Biden's new Title IX rules for education facilities that benefit from public funding. These rules cover matters such as responding to reports of sexual harassment and misconduct, accommodating pregnant students and protecting students from sex-based discrimination.

What has right-wingers' panties in a bunch is that the anti-discrimination rules protect students who are LGBTQ+ — particularly since many Republican-run states have recently passed pro-discrimination laws explicitly targeting transgender persons.

So far, officials in Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and South Carolina—most of them governors—have said in letters, statements, press conferences or executive orders that their states will not follow the new Title IX regulations. The rule applies to every school at the K-12 and postsecondary level that receives federal money. So far, most state officials have either focused on K-12 schools or made general statements that their state will not comply, while others have specifically mentioned colleges.

Texas and Louisiana are among the GOP-run states and school boards that have filed challenges to the Biden rules; their cases will go before radical right-wing judges appointed by Trump. That includes the virulently antigay activist Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk (whom I featured here last September and here in November, 2022).

Given the hostility to LGBTQ+ persons of Trump and Dubya Bush appointees taking these cases, not to mention that of the doctrinaire theocrats on the current Supreme Court, transgender student rights could well be doomed whether Trump gets to issue his Reichstag Fire Decrees on Day One or not.