Q Toon: All Up In Her Business

Tammy Baldwin, the first out lesbian elected to the United States Senate, has had Republican opponents point out her sexual orientation in each of her four election campaigns. And I'm sure the guys have all just been trying to be helpful.

They don’t make it a campaign issue, but they never fail to mention it, in case there's some housewife up in Ashwaubenon who needed that nugget of information to make up her mind whom to vote for. I can't imagine why other Republican candidates don't bring up their heterosexual opponents’ sexuality unbidden, can you?

Senator Baldwin this year faces bank executive Eric Hovde, who has homes in both the Madison area and Laguna Beach, California; the latter described by the Los Angeles Times as "a mansion." Baldwin's TV and social media ads have played up his California residency, as well as statements Hovde made during his 2012 candidacy questioning allowing seniors who live in assisted living to vote, suggesting that farmers these days have it easy, proposing raising Social Security eligibility age to 72, and "completely" opposing abortion rights. Her tag line for these ads is "What's wrong with this guy?"

Hovde, since his last run, has grown a mustache that gives him the look of the guy in a 1980's movie plotting to steal away the girl, bulldoze the skateboard park, and buy out the rent-controlled apartment building where grandma lives. He has been trying to counter that California banker image with ads pointing out that Tammy Baldwin's girlfriend is a Wall Street financial manager whose investments might be affected by Senate legislation.

Some of his and his backers' ads call her "girlfriend," and some call her "partner." Hovde used the latter when he brought her up in the candidates' one and only debate appearance last Friday.

Baldwin and Maria Brisbane have been dating for about six years, and share an apartment in Washington D.C. They could get married if they wanted to, but for reasons that are none of our business, they haven't. Senate ethics rules have little to say about conflicts of interest covering the dating habits of unmarried members, and perhaps they should. Who wants the job of spelling out at what moment a relationship becomes reportable?

In the third panel of my cartoon this week, I quoted directly Baldwin's response to Hovde's demand that she report Ms. Brisbane's financial activities. I suspect it was a line Baldwin had ready and waiting to deliver, a handy pivot to Hovde's shared position with the Republican Party that women's health care decisions should be left up to statehouse politicians. 

She's hoping that it's a winning argument, and trends suggest it could be. Pro-choice advocates have done surprisingly well even in "red" states ever since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, revealing that Republicans' talk all this time about reducing the size of government meant making it small enough to fit inside a woman's vagina.

The couple in the fourth panel of my cartoon are fairly confident in Baldwin's prospects on November 5 — more confident than I am myself. The polls are reportedly running extremely close, within the margin of error. And you will recall that this state inexplicably tossed Senator Russ Feingold aside — twice — in favor of Ron Johnson, of all people.

Early voting in Wisconsin started on Tuesday, so I marched right on down to the village hall and did my part to send Ron Johnson Jr. back to Laguna Beach.

I'd keep my fingers crossed, but I still have some cartoons to draw.

Another Week's Sneak Peek

Instead of the usual snippet from my upcoming cartoon, here's an oldie on a related subject, starring my old standby Republican congressman character:

Q Toon: Getting to First Base

We are told that Amazon Prime's adaptation of "A League of Their Own" into a television series will not shy away from the presence of lesbians in the teams of the wartime All-American Girls Professional League (AAGPL).

There was no acknowledgment of that in the 1992 movie. In fact, director Penny Marshall specifically instructed actor Rosie O'Donnell not to portray her character, Doris Murphy, as lesbian. (O'Donnell shows up in Amazon Prime's version as the proprietor of a drinking establishment catering to customers who, in the parlance of the day, "played for the other team.")

The new version also addresses issues of race that you might have missed in the original. DeLisa Chinn-Tyler played an unnamed spectator who returns an overthrown ball to Geena Davis's character with impeccable speed and accuracy, a scene Marshall had written into her movie to point out that there were no Black players in the AAGPL. But you won't find Chinn-Tyler in imdb.com's list of the cast, either.

In a twofer role in the 2022 series, Chanté Adams plays "Max" Chapman, a Black lesbian pitcher who is barred from trying out for the league on account of the color of her skin. Her story line in Season One never merges with those of the characters who do make the Rockford Peaches' roster, but if the series ends up lasting longer than the AAGPL ever did, perhaps we'll see some historical revisionism.

Heck, CBS's "M*A*S*H" outlasted the Korean War long enough for Major "Hot Lips" Houlihan to become a women's libber and Captain "Hawkeye" Pierce to develop what we would now call "wokeness."

All of the Amazon "League of Their Own" characters are fictional, so I suppose their careers can go in any direction the writers fancy. If Max Chapman doesn't end up in the AAGPL, perhaps she will join Mamie Johnson, Connie Morgan, and Toni Stone, three real-life women who played in the Negro Leagues during WWII. As long as she doesn't marry her girlfriend at St. Mary Oratory, pilot the Enola Gay, and get elected Governor of Illinois, I'm willing to grant the writers some poetic license.

CBS, by the way, attempted a series based on "A League of Their Own" back in the 1990's, recasting all but two of the roles. It lasted for only three episodes, so it never had a chance to introduce any lesbian or Black story lines — as if that were particularly likely. 

Getting back to today's cartoon: as longtime readers have probably figured out by now, I try to include diversity, racial and otherwise, in my cartoons whenever possible. Given attitudes of the 1940's, including a non-White person in this week's scenario didn't seem realistic, even for a cartoon. And even considering that the blonde in the pink dress is clearly not a ballplayer.

In hindsight, however, perhaps a will-they-won't-they romantic relationship with one of the Rockford Peaches is how the writers will eventually integrate Max into the series.

Assuming it lasts more than three episodes this time.

Q Toon: Riding Into the Sunset

Utah's newest Senator has captured attention with his op-ed swipe at Donald Joffrey Trump, but let us take a moment here to commend Utah's newly retired Senator Orrin Hatch. In his farewell address to the Senate, Hatch, who earned a Zero on the Human Rights Campaign's most recent scorecard on LGBTQ issues and once claimed that homosexuals have a "psychological deficiency," urged his colleagues to find common ground with the LGBTQ community:

“Nowhere is the pluralist approach more needed than in the fraught relationship between religious liberty and LGBTQ rights. . . . Religious liberty is a fundamental freedom. It deserves the very highest protection our country can provide. At the same time, it’s also important to [take] account of other interests as well – especially those of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. Pluralism shows us a better way. It shows us that protecting religious liberty and preserving the rights of LGBTQ individuals are not mutually exclusive. I believe we can find substantial common ground on these issues that will enable us to both safeguard the ability of religious individuals to live their faith and protect LGBTQ individuals from invidious discrimination.”

That moment of commendation now being dispensed with, let us turn to Utah's now Senior Senator, Mike Lee, who is single-handedly holding up the nomination of three Employment Equal Opportunity Commissioners, and thus denying the EEOC a quorum to take any action, because one of them is a lesbian.

The religious right has had their knickers in a wad over Chai Feldblum ever since President Barack Obama named her to the five-member EEOC in 2010, because she supports marriage equality. They have fabricated inflammatory remarks she never made and twisted others to portray her as hostile to the faithful.

Conservative activists have condemned Feldblum in the American Conservative (“an enemy of religious liberty”), the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal (a “radical nominee”), the Daily Wire (“Trump’s worst federal nomination”), the Blaze (“radical activist against religious freedom”), and elsewhere. Led by the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, right-wing advocacy groups have condemned Trump’s re-nomination of Feldblum. (The FRC previously maligned Feldblum by crediting her with the statement “Gays win; Christians lose,” which she never said.) In a statement, Lee echoed these criticisms, alleging that Feldblum has “radical views on marriage and the appropriate use of government power” that would lead her “to use the might of government to stamp out traditional marriage supporters.”

Feldblum, the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, has responded that she was raised “in a home in which religion and God were the defining aspects of our daily lives.” Her 2006 essay on finding an accommodation between non-discrimination policies and "religious liberty," Moral Conflict and Liberty: Gay Rights and Religion, leans toward favoring non-discrimination...

If I am denied a job, an apartment, a room at a hotel, a table at a restaurant or a procedure by a doctor because I am a lesbian, that is a deep, intense and tangible hurt. That hurt is not alleviated because I might be able to go down the street and get a job, an apartment, a hotel room, a restaurant table or a medical procedure from someone else. The assault to my dignity and my sense of safety in the world occurs when the initial denial happens. That assault is not mitigated by the fact that others might not treat me in the same way.

...but insists that religious beliefs are owed respect and a place in public policy.

My argument in this article is that intellectual coherence and ethical integrity demand that we acknowledge that civil rights laws can burden an individual's belief liberty interest when the conduct demanded by these laws burdens an individual's core beliefs, whether these beliefs are religiously based or secularly based. Acknowledging such a liberty interest will not necessarily result in the invalidation of the law or the granting of an exemption for the religious individual. 

Which sounds to me like she and Senator Hatch could have had some meaningful conversation, had he not waited until he was on his way out the door to float the idea of reason, rationality, and compromise.

Q Toon: The Mystery of Janet Napolitano's Vault

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q Syndicate•Aug 22, 2012 EditorialCartoonists.com

This little news item somehow got buried beneath the gynecological expertise of Congressman Todd "Legitimate Rape"Akins (R-MO) and the swimming form of Congressman Kevin "Galilee Skinny Dipper" Yoder (R-KS) this week. Last Friday, "Fox and Friends" aired a story from which Geraldo Rivera concluded that lesbians are taking over the Department of Homeland Security.

Somehow, I thought this would be earthshaking news.

Geraldo: Is the subtext of the Department of Homeland Security Scandal that there is some sort of a lesbian cabal, that it's a same-sex takeover the the big agency?
Doocy: What do you think?
Kilmeade: Steve, what do you think?
Geraldo: I don't know. It just seems like everyone is talking around it. Is that really what people are saying? That men are disadvantaged because women, specifically lesbians, are ruling the roost there?
Carlson: I don't know about that last part.
Geraldo: It just seems that everyone is dancing around. No one's -- they're kind of making these inferences. That's what I'm saying.
Kilmeade: We don't know for sure, but it's easy to come to that conclusion, that there's some different type of glass ceiling separating the Homeland Security Department.
Geraldo: So, no, no machos need apply?

Where is Jack Bauer when we really need him?

Q Toon: Bachmann Tooner Overheard

This week should, I suppose, have been time for a cartoon about the end at long last of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," had I been confident enough that there wouldn't be some last second maneuver from out of the blue to stop its repeal. Happily, the transition to equal opportunity in the military has been achieved smoothly and without a hitch -- which doesn't make for a particularly funny cartoon, but perhaps Chuck Asay or Michael Ramirez will draw some cartoon heralding the End Times that will inspire a cartoon next week.

So here instead is another Michele Bachmann cartoon. In case you missed it, Bachmann claimed in a TV interview that some woman at a campaign appearance had told her that the woman's daughter had been given the vaccine to prevent the cancer-causing Human Papillomavirus, and the daughter had subsequently become mentally retarded. Medical authorities swiftly condemned Bachmann's claim, and Bachmann retreated slightly by saying that she was just repeating what some anonymous woman had told her. (But in these days when everybody and their dog has a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and a blog, don't you think someone would have already found some trace of this phantom mother by now?)

Meanwhile, it looks like Bachmann is Last Month's Flavor of the Month, so I'm now working on my Rick Perry caricature. Tune in again tomorrow for my first attempt.