Q Toon: No More Mr. Nice Guy

Donald Trump — or whoever took charge of his Twitter account Friday afternoon — posted the first acknowledgement of LGBTQ Pride Month of his presidency last week.

Was that really Donald Trump, or did Ric Grenell hack the presidential Twitter account? There are no misspelled words, sentence fragments, or gratuitous digs at President Obama. And there are only two words that were capitalized unnecessarily.

Whoever it was, I have to wonder if he or she knows what the "T" stands for. Or that LGBT does not stand for "Lesbians & Gays Backing Trump."

The "T" stands for Transgender, a group that has endured sustained hostility from the Corrupt Trump Administration. I've drawn before about their determination to remove protections for transgender prisoners and to boot transgender soldiers out of the military; now they have moved to block transgender civilians from medical care under the Affordable Care Act.

The Department of Health and Human Services announced Friday it plans to remove gender identity from the class of people protected from discrimination in health care.
The agency said it is revising a section of Obamacare that provides protection against discrimination in health care on the basis of race, color, national origin, disability and age. A rule published under the Obama administration in 2016 confirmed that transgender people were protected under the law’s provisions that prohibit discrimination from providers and insurers.

Earlier in the week, the Department of Housing and Urban Development put forth a ruling allowing homeless shelters to discriminate against transgender persons.

Nearly one-third of transgender Americans who responded to a 2015 survey have experienced homelessness in their lifetime. Requiring transgender people to stay in shelters that don't match their gender identity can put them at further risk of violence and harassment, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality. 

Last year, I was willing to consider the possibility that the anti-transgender policies of the Corrupt Trump Administration were due to a select cabal of underlings pushing an agenda of Special Rights for Evangelicals, but I have become increasingly convinced that there's a porn star out there somewhere whom Trump found to be somewhat other than advertised. And who didn't settle for a measly $130 grand to keep quiet.

Trump has, so far, pushed one anti-transgender policy after another upon the Departments of Defense, Health & Human Services, Housing & Urban Development. Labor, Homeland Security and the Justice Department can't be far behind.

Before he gets driven from office, look for similar edicts protecting anti-transgender discrimination by energy companies, national parks, and the IRS.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Saturday's post included a cartoon by a "J. Thomas" that appeared in the Bend Bulletin of Bend, Oregon, on June 20, 1919. I credited the cartoon to the Bulletin, even though it was a small newspaper in a small town that seems unlikely (but not inconceivably so) to have had its own editorial cartoonist.

Looking through several issues of the Bulletin from that year, I found no other editorial cartoonists' work on its pages (it did run one comic strip), and I have found Mr. Thomas' cartoons in no other newspaper. I have yet to run across one J. Thomas cartoon about state or local issues; he does, however, seem to have shown a good deal of interest in rural issues. He may therefore have drawn for a news service that supplied content for little rural papers like the Bulletin.

If anyone knows anything about J. Thomas, please let me know in the comments. I've got another of his cartoons pegged for a Saturday post in a few weeks, and I'd like to be able to credit his work correctly.

Toon: The Littlest Angels

Whenever I see anti-abortion editorial cartoons depicting aborted fetuses in heaven, they're always drawn as full-term toddlers. In fact, extremely few abortions involve fetuses anywhere near that stage of development. But those cartoons wouldn't be half as effective if they depicted the fetuses during the first trimester of development.

So now Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Ohio (states, coincidentally, with some of the highest infant mortality rates in the nation) have passed laws that, for all practical purposes, criminalize abortions performed any time after pregnancy is detected — so early on that, if a cartoonist was being honest about it, he/she would have to label the fetus as human so that the reader wouldn't mistake it for a fetal camel or kinkajou.

Of course, I have no first-hand knowledge of what conditions are like in heaven. The Apostles' Creed posits that we believe in carnis resurrectionem, placing that tenet well after the section that is all about Jesus Christ and meaning that we all expect to come rising flesh and blood out of our graves, crypts, urns and wherever Donny Kerabatsos ended up.

Theologians with nothing better to do have spent centuries debating whether that means we come back to spend eternal life in a body in the same condition we left it in. If you ever had a limb amputated during your life, will you need to know where to find it if you want it back? Do you get to bring your dentures along? Will those who lived a good long life have reason to spend eternity envying those who died in their prime?

And what of the millions throughout history who never made it to the prime of life? Many of my generation will remember the story of The Littlest Angel, an eight-year-old who finds heaven to be an absolutely miserable place for little boys. If he couldn't sing in tune with the heavenly choir or keep his halo from rolling away down the Golden Streets, what hope does an eight-week fetal angel have?

One for the Ladies

If it's Suffragette Saturday, it must be time to check in on the progress of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution 100 years ago this month.

"It's a Long Lane That Has No Turning" by O.P. Williams in Los Angeles Evening Herald New York Journal, June 18, 1919

Passage of the amendment had failed in the Senate by one vote back in February after passage in the House. Congress then adjourned in April, but heeding demands of the suffragettes, President Wilson called Congress into special session in May. The House again passed the amendment on May 21, 1919; and this time, it finally passed the Senate with two votes to spare (56 to 25) on June 4, 1919.

"Kissing the Bride" by Bob Satterfield, June, 1919

Illinois was first to ratify the amendment on June 10, followed quickly by Michigan and Wisconsin. Suffragists wanted the amendment ratified in time for the 1920 elections, but contrary to Bob Satterfield's cartoon, ratification of the 19th Amendment was not going to be quite as rapid as it had been for the 18th.

Detail from "Cartoons of the Day" by John T. McCutcheon for Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1919

For one thing, many state legislatures were out of session for the summer. For another, there was stiff opposition throughout the South. (Mississippi would eventually get around to ratifying the amendment in the year of our Lord 1984.)

"Her 'Wallflower' Days Are Over" by Leo Thiele in Sioux City Tribune, June, 1919

Elsewhere, however, the potential cost of alienating such a huge voting bloc ensured that both parties had a vested interest in wooing those new voters. After all, any women who didn't think women deserved the vote weren't liable to come out to vote against the politicians who voted for suffrage, would they?

"The New Ringmaster" by J. Thomas in Bend (OR) Bulletin, June 20, 1919

Whereas the women who were eager to vote might take want to show up to the polls to tell the politicians who voted against it a thing or two.

"Like It?" by John Cassel in New York Evening World, June 6, 1919

Like it? You'd better get used to it.

"Nose Powder an' Hair Pins" by Bill Donahey in Cleveland Plain Dealer, June, 1919

Q Toon: June 28, 1969

This June marks the 50-year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, generally regarded as one of the key turning points in the gay liberation movement (as it was called before we became an unpronounceable acronym).

For anyone needing to catch up, New York police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, at 1:20 a.m. on June 28, 1969. Typically, these raids netted a dozen or so humiliated gays, lesbians, transsexuals or transvestites ("transgender" not yet being in common parlance) hoping against hope to keep their names and photos out of the newspaper.

But whether it was the weather, or the death of Judy Garland, or Canada having just decriminalized homosexuality, or Freddy Mercury in retrograde, the customers of the Stonewall decided not to go quietly. They refused to cooperate with the police, who then announced that they would arrest everyone in the bar. A crowd gathered as the police waited for additional paddy wagons to arrive; police escalated their use of force, and the riot began. And lasted through the weekend, flaring up anew on Wednesday in response to insulting reportage in The Village Voice.

Today's cartoon would have taken place in a relatively quiet moment.

So, then, how far have we come in the half century thence?

LGBTQ actors are much freer to be out and open about their sexuality than their counterparts fifty years ago; and films about us do not consistently portray us as doomed social misfits who die unloved and unmourned by the final reel.

Marriage equality was hardly on anybody's radar in 1969. Keeping one's job and staying out of jail were more pressing issues. The burden is now on the religious right as they fight to restore for themselves the privilege of being able to discriminate against us in employment, housing, and health and public services.

With the war in Vietnam becoming increasingly unpopular, military service wasn't a hot issue for the gay liberation movement, either. But there were nevertheless those at the time whose career calling was in the military; and in spite of failed half-measures such as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," sexual orientation is no longer an automatic bar to military service and advancement. Whether the Corrupt Trump Administration's current regressive policies prove to be a temporary setback or not remains to be seen.

I'd still rate Pete Buttigieg as a long shot to be inaugurated president on January 20, 2020, but taking his candidacy seriously at all would have been inconceivable in 1969. Still, our prescient perp overlooks the fact that other countries have or have had openly LGBTQ heads of state in the 21st Century. And none of them have been consumed by fire or brimstone.

The tendency toward finding community in urban centers has concentrated our political power there and in the one political party left with concern for urban issues. It has, unfortunately, contributed to the acreage advantage the other political party has to diminish our influence on a state and national scale by the gerrymander, and to disregard the Log Cabineers, GOProudsters, and Caitlyn Jenners along its fringe.

Flexing its legislative, financial and current executive muscle, that political party has spent the past fifty years stacking the courts with reactionary activists, so this is no time to trust that progress made will be progress kept.

This Week's Sneak Peek

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

—Wilfred Owen

Silence of the Sams

I had planned to save these cartoons for this summer, but after Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson's stunning performance in front of Congress this week, now seems to be a good time for Scamback Saturday to remember one of his predecessors at the department.

Samuel Pierce was Secretary of HUD from 1981 to 1989.  Pierce had the distinction of being the only African-American in Ronald Reagan's cabinet, and the only cabinet official to serve in the same post for all eight years of Reagan's presidency.

Several HUD Secretaries have been former mayors or otherwise professionally involved in urban renewal. But like Ben Carson, Pierce had no such experience before Reagan named him to the job. Also like Ben Carson, Pierce was African-American, the Republican euphemism for which is "urban," an area the increasingly exurban and rural Republican Party could hardly care less about. If a Republican president has to have one Black person in the cabinet just for appearances sake, he might as well be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, even if his field of expertise is brain surgery and he's totally unfamiliar with real estate jargon.

Unlike Carson, however, Sam Pierce at least had ample subcabinet-level experience, starting out in Eisenhower's Department of Labor and later as general counsel to Nixon's Treasury Department. But the tenure of "Silent Sam" at HUD was so low-key that when he and the president who appointed him attended a U.S. Conference of Mayors luncheon, Reagan thought Pierce was one of the mayors.

I'm not kidding.

Chuck Stone, a black editor at the Philadelphia Daily News and longtime acquaintance of Pierce, says the Secretary “has the three B’s Republicans like—brilliance, blackness and blandness. Republicans don’t like audacious blacks.”

It was only after Pierce was gone that an investigation by the U.S. Office of the Independent Counsel uncovered mismanagement and political favoritism in HUD dating from his first days on the job.

UW-Milwaukee Post, July 25, 1989

Despite a pledge during his Senate confirmation hearings to ''sever'' his ties to his former New York law firm, Samuel R. Pierce Jr. regularly did personal favors for his former colleagues and interceded with subordinates in the Department of Housing and Urban Development on their behalf, documents from his office files show.

While there is no indication that the former Secretary broke any law barring conflicts of interest or directed subordinates to act improperly, Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California, said the documents raised ''additional questions about Secretary Pierce's management at H.U.D.''  ...

Ethics lawyers at H.U.D. said Mr. Pierce's agreement to sever ties with the firm did not bar him from all dealings with it. And lawyers at the Office of Government Ethics said that to prove a criminal violation against an official like Mr. Pierce, a prosecutor would have to demonstrate that he personally and substantially took part in a matter affecting his former firm. 

Investigators also uncovered several cases in which outside agents managing the foreclosure of properties on behalf of HUD, instead of subtracting their management fees and turning the rest of the proceeds over to HUD, were pocketing the entire proceeds and never filing the paperwork. Contracts went to politically connected landlords and developers, funneling money to the campaigns of a number of politicians.

Drawn for an edition of the Post that wasn't published

As the scandals came to light, Pierce claimed that HUD was too big for him to follow individual programs, and he threw his chief aide, Deborah Gore Dean under the bus. She and others on Pierce's staff would be convicted on various felony charges, but Pierce himself was never charged with any criminal activity.

UW-Parkside Ranger, September 28, 1989

Now, I have to caution that there was never any connection between the shenanigans at HUD and the Iran-Contra scandal.

But one familiar name from the Corrupt Trump Administration pops up in those 30-year-old reports.

As one particular scam involving conversion of some abandoned World War II era internment facilities for Japanese-Americans into apartment dwellings was reported in Newsweek in 1989:

The moving force in the project was Paul Manafort, a Reagan campaign consultant in 1980 who later diversified into lobbying and power brokering. When a friend told him the ancient housing project was for sale, Manafort sounded out Deborah Gore Dean, Pierce's chief aide, and got informal encouragement that he could get a rehabilitation contract. Through another crony, he persuaded New Jersey officials to apply for a grant; with two associates, he formed CFM Development Corp. and bought the project for $4.4 million. HUD promptly approved the project, providing $5 million in construction funds and guaranteeing rent subsidies totaling $31.1 million over 15 years. CFM hired Manafort's firm, Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly [okay, more than one familiar name there!] to keep the wheels greased at HUD, paying it a consultant's fee of $326,000. The rent subsidies guaranteed an operating profit, but the program offered a second bonanza in the form of $11 million worth of tax credits. ...
Mayor Bruce Peterson of Upper Deerfield Township, N.J., called the project "a horrible waste of the taxpayers' money." It was imposed on the community as a fait accompli, he testified; the housing wasn't needed, the buildings were too old and shabby, the work being done was shoddy and the subsidized rents were way above local standards.

✍

These four cartoons about Samuel Pierce are the most I've ever drawn about any Secretary of HUD. The only other HUD Secretary I've ever cartooned was Jack Kemp, who comes in second place, and only because he's in that second cartoon about Pierce. Which never got published until now, so it shouldn't even count.

UW-Parkside Ranger, November 2, 1989

On the other hand, Kemp did appear in at least one of my cartoons when he was Republican Vice Presidential nominee in 1996. For that matter, I've drawn Carson in at least three cartoons, but as a 2016 presidential candidate.

Since the ratio of verbiage to cartoons in this post is weighted too heavily to the former, here's one of those Carson cartoons.