With a Rebel Yell She Cried

Shaltnotback Saturday takes this last opportunity before the special election in Alabama to rehash the three four* cartoons I've drawn about the Republican standard bearer in the race. Alabama voters will go to the polls this a week from Tuesday to elect someone to complete Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III's term in the U.S. Senate. The odds-on favorite according to the latest polls? Moore, Moore, Moore.

State Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore made himself a cause celèbre in 2001 by unilaterally installing a 5,200-lb. granite monument of the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments in the lobby of the state judicial building. He sparked a reprise of the lawsuits and countersuits sparked after he had mounted a wooden version of the Decalogue in his Etowah County courtroom in 1992, but this time it ended with his fellow justices removing the monument when he refused a federal court order to do so.

A judicial panel then removed Moore himself from the Court, but Alabama's voters returned him to the seat in 2012.

I occasionally get push-back from right-wing Christian evangelicals who object when I refer to the politicians who push their agenda as "theocrats." When it comes to the theocratic agenda, Judge Roy Moore is the case in point.

Having sworn to uphold the law, he nevertheless insisted upon being a law unto himself after the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges established marriage equality as the law of the land. He instructed Alabama officials to openly defy the Supreme Court decision and to deny equal rights to Alabama's LGBTQ citizens. The U.S. Constitution be damned, he declared; it's the Book of Leviticus that is the supreme law of the land.

* I had forgotten about this one!

And for the second time, the judicial panel removed him from the State Supreme Court.

For all his posturing as a paragon of Biblical morality, accounts of Judge Moore having been a creepy guy hanging around the mall angling to pick up teenage girls began to came to light last month:

His hardened core of supporters includes a number of prominent "Evangelical Christians" and their fiercely loyal flock; given their support of the Pussy-Grabber in Chief, why wouldn't they be equally eager to overlook Moore's prurient interest in pubescent girls? When you're a Republican, they let you do anything.

The other day, I read a comment on GoComics trying to cast this as a Democratic scandal, because Moore "was a DEMOCRAT when all the incidents are supposed to have happened" — a variation on the drivel blaming Democrats for racism because way back in great-great-grandpappy's day, all the racists were Democrats. (Left unsaid is that the racists have since found the Republican party more hospitable to them. If the Democrats drive Al Franken and John Conyers out, perhaps sex offenders will follow the racists to the party of Trump and Moore.)

Meanwhile, Moore's Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, prosecuted the men who bombed the two surviving perpetrators of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which you might think would give him some credibility as a defender of Christianity. But no.

I guess they can't forgive Jones for also coordinating the state and federal task force tracking down and prosecuting Eric Rudolph for a string of bombings 20 years ago, including the 1998 attack on Birmingham's New Woman All Women Health Care Center, killing a police officer and critically injuring a nurse.

It was an abortion clinic, after all.

Perhaps you remember Mr. Rudolph, a radical Christian terrorist whose other targets included LGBTQ bars and the 1996 Olympics.

✍

With December 7 coming up this week, I would be remiss if I failed to take note of this Day That Will Live In Infamy:

100 years ago this Thursday, the United States, citing "repeated acts of war against the government and the people of the United States," declared war on Austria-Hungary. Unlike the European powers, whose treaties bound them to declare war on each other like a room full of tripping mousetraps, the U.S. had up to this point been at war only with Germany.

The House passed President Wilson's declaration of war against the Hapsburg Empire by a vote of 365 to 1, the lone dissenting vote being cast by Rep. Meyer London (Socialist-NY). The Senate approved the measure unanimously (Sen. Robert LaFollette, Progressive-WI, being intentionally absent).

The declaration enabled American soldiers to come to the aid of Italy in its fight against the Central Powers. 5,000 members of the 332nd Infantry would fight alongside Italian troops in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in the fall of 1918.

"The Avalanche" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Star, December, 1917

Up the Ante Clause

Q Toon: Last Man Standing

Adding Matt Lauer and Garrison Keillor to the list of disgraced sexual shenanigangsters, I believe we're getting dangerously close to witnessing any more allegations just becoming so much background noise.

Either that, or unless women suddenly decide to adopt the chador or habit as everyday dress, men are going to be forced to wear thick woolen mittens at all times. And pants which sound an alarm whenever dropped below the waist.

No, I'm pretty sure this will all blow over and everything will go back to status quo ante.

You don't think so?

I caught part of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor celebration of David Letterman on PBS last week. Senator Al Franken had been the first presenter in the ceremony, but because of the recent accusations against him of sexually improper behavior, the telecast edited out his appearance and the part of Letterman's acceptance speech in which he paid tribute to Franken. Franken is also missing from the list on the Kennedy Center's web site of the evening's featured speakers.

I couldn't help thinking how ironic it was that Letterman was publicly humiliated by a sexual impropriety scandal of his own only eight years ago.

Happy Hollerdays from the White House

Fa la la la la, la la, la, la!

This Week's Sneak Peek

And the tie is officially broken!

School for Sex Scandal

I've been over the river and through the woods with family over the Thanksgiving holiday, so I may have missed whatever new accusations of sexual harassment or under age dating or indecent exposure have come out against whatever beloved, respected, or powerful politician, entertainer or sports figure came out Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. It's not as though I've been incommunicado with the world, but given the vast range of political opinions around our dinner table, some subjects just had to be ignored for a while.

But now that we're all back home with our Thanksgiving leftovers, Sexcapadeback Saturday reheats cartoons of selected sexual scandals that I've had the occasion to draw about. This mess didn't start with Harvey Weinstein, and it probably won't end with Charlie Rose. It goes way back, and there has often been one Usual Suspect in particular.

Because of the accusations against Alabama Inquisitor Judge Roy Moore, conservatives want to re-litigate the sexual dalliances of President Bill Clinton. His peccadilloes fall in that gray area between consensual affairs and clear and obvious sexual harassment; Monica Lewinsky was no 14-year-old, but she was a subordinate employee, and the episode displayed, more than any of Clinton's other affairs, a profound lapse of judgement on the President's part.

But if we are to re-litigate the Clinton imbroglio, it's only fair to file an amicus curiae brief about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, too. After all, unlike Bill Clinton, Justice Thomas is still regularly collecting a government paycheck.

Sexual harassment scandals are the exclusive province of no political party. But the Edwin Edwards test often determines the degree of damage to the accused: the Louisiana Democrat once boasted, "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy."

In 2006, Republican Congressman Mark Foley lost his reelection bid in Florida over revelations that he propositioned male pages who worked in his office.

Four years later, it was Democrat Eric Massa of New York who was compelled to resign as the House Ethics Committee investigated reports that he habitually groped male members of his staff. He admitted on Glenn Beck's Fox News program that "not only did I grope [a staffer], I tickled him until he couldn't breathe," but then he denied on Larry King's CNN program ever having groped anyone.

The revelations that House Speaker Dennis Hastert had molested student athletes when he was a high school wrestling coach in Illinois came out only after he had left office. The statute of limitations had run out on those incidents; he was convicted of violating banking rules when he paid hush money to the now adult victims of his predatory behavior.

Sexual harassment typically involves an imbalance of power: adult vs. adolescent or child; employer vs. employee; faculty vs. student; celebrity vs. average citizen. Or the strong arm of the law vs. the legally vulnerable:

Many of these cartoons have involved male-on-male misdeeds because I draw cartoons for the LGBTQ press, so unless the perpetrator has a history of telling us how immoral we are, it's extremely rare that I turn my pen to heterosexual hanky-panky. In part it's also because for so long, male-to-female sexual harassment was passed off as relatively normative — even funny. (You can draw a straight line from Pepe LePew to Al Franken.)

When it comes to sexual relationships between adults and children, however, we have always reacted with more seriousness, whether we're talking about girls or boys. (Gauzy recollections of heterosexual boys coming of age in The Graduate and The Summer of '42 notwithstanding.) Prior to the Roy Moore accusations, the right-wing media played up man-on-boy pedophilia scandals because it was so easy to extrapolate sexual misbehavior victimizing under-age males with consensual and healthy relationships between adult gay men.

The LGBTQ community constantly needs to remind Republican Puritans that one thing is not always like another thing. Again and again.

Q Toon: Good News/Bad News Bears

I'm throwing everything but the kitchen sink into this week's cartoon. Gosh, I hope I'm able to find something else to draw about next week.

Danica Roem received a fair amount of press when she was elected to her state legislature, not only because she is the first openly transgender person elected to such a position in this country, but also because she unseated a lead sponsor of Virginia's version of a "bathroom bill."

You might also have caught coverage of Australia's non-binding referendum on marriage equality; over the month of October, over 12 million Australians sent in their ballots by mail, with nearly 62% of respondents voting Yes.  While the 80% voter participation fell somewhat short of  regular compulsory elections, that's a rate greatly above any national election in the U.S.

Other news items may have escaped your notice unless you follow LGBTQ news closely. This past Monday was Transgender Day of Remembrance, by which time 25 transgender persons had been murdered in the U.S. in 2017. According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), that sets a record.

HRC is sounding the alarm over five Trump-Pence administration judicial nominees openly hostile to LGBTQ rights, Jeff Mateer, Damien Schiff, Leonard Steven Grasz, Mark Norris, and Stephen Schwartz. I drew a cartoon about Mateer in September.

I didn't include the name of Ohio State Representative Wes Goodman, a married "up and coming conservative" who pushed anti-LGBTQ legislation by day and "exchanged salacious texts and emails with gay men he met on Capitol Hill, and sent sexually suggestive messages to young men" by night; he was forced to resign over "inappropriate behavior" with a man in his state office in Columbus.

And finally, anti-LGBTQ repression is on the rise in Turkey as the country abandons its secular government in favor of a sharia-based one. This week, the governor of the capital Ankara banned "any events such as LGBT... cinema, theater, panels, interviews, exhibitions are banned until further notice in our province to provide peace and security." Gay pride events have been banned in Istanbul for the past two years, although homosexuality is not a crime per se.

I visited Turkey once, in 1996, and I would have liked to go back; that first visit only scratched the surface of the place. But there's no chance I would go there the way things are now.

Ah, well. We'll always have Australia.