Q Toon: The Overturners

Our ethically challenged Supreme Court is set to hand down their rulings for the year this month. Given the right-wingers' determination to overturn precedent wherever it suits them, we can anticipate some doozies.

Justices Thomas and Alito in particular have expressly condemned established case law involving privacy rights under the 14th Amendment that has granted citizens the right to contraception, extramarital sex within one's own home, and same-sex marriage. (Those 14th Amendment rulings include mixed-race marriage rights, too, but least one of them seems okay with leaving that precedent alone. Although overturning Loving v. Virginia could render Justice Thomas's ethical dilemma moot.)

The Justices in today's cartoon have already overturned half a century of precedent on abortion rights— which, frankly, shouldn't have surprised anybody as much as it did. The Court had been hacking away at the edges of Roe v. Wade for most of those fifty years, stocked as it has been by every Republican administration with committed anti-abortion activists.

Those Republican Justices are equally committed to bolstering the rights of corporations over individuals of lesser means. The monies, properties, vacations, and campers Justice Thomas has accepted from well-heeled amici curiae would have made Abe Fortas blush. But you really can't argue that such corporate largesse influenced his opinions. That stuff was not so much bribes as loyalty perks.

And then there's United States v. Trump. Handed the open-and-shut question in April of whether a Former President Named Donald Trump has absolute and permanent immunity against being charged with his crimes, the Supremes decided they needed more time to think about it. Perhaps our Constitutional Originalists and their ouija boards will have figured out by the end of June how the Founding Fathers meant to grant Trump immunity without extending the same to Biden, Obama, Clinton, and Carter.

Oyez, oyez, oyez.

WisToon: Ask Not For Hovde Bell Tolls

Eric Hovde is making his second try for the Senate seat held by Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) this year. In 2012, he lost in the primary to former Governor Tommy Thompson; this time around, he's the Republican Party favorite.

Like a traditional Republican, he promises to end budget deficits (without saying whose budget he intends to slash). His ads blame Senator Baldwin for inflation, illegal immigration, and the supposed Biden plot to get rid of gas-powered cars. A TV ad by a shadow group funded by Hovde's brother charges that Baldwin of told people to stay home when COVID-19 first spread, “but used your money to fly to New York to live with her girlfriend at her lavish multimillion dollar apartment.”

When not playing up what Senator Baldwin has done for Wisconsinites, the Democrats' TV and social media ads attack Hovde for being a wealthy hedge fund manager living in sunny California (he counters that he grew up in Wisconsin and graduated from the University in Madison), and that he wants to take away old people's right to vote.

The ad by Senate Majority PAC includes a sound bite of Hovde, whose company owns a nursing home, telling a radio interviewer, “If you’re in a nursing home, you only have five, six months life expectancy. Almost nobody in a nursing home is at a point to vote.”

The Hovde campaign responded that he was only talking about Republican-fueled (and exaggerated) complaints about what they charge was a suspiciously high rate of voting at some nursing homes in Racine and Madison in the last election.

Just the same, I wouldn't want my loved ones in a nursing home run with that attitude.

✍

Speaking of my loved ones, we joke that Eric Hovde might be a cousin of ours.

It's conceivable. My great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was a Hovde. We have her family traced back a few more generations, but we know nothing of any of her siblings' descendants. It's entirely possible, however, that the surname refers to the farm where she was raised, and that anyone who worked there would be given that last name whether they were blood relatives or not.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Had enough upside-down flag cartoons yet?

Well, tough. 

As it happens, I was out of town for a family wedding over the weekend. An old friend of my husband's lives in the area near the wedding, so I drew this week's cartoon early in case we had the opportunity to stop by for a visit. (The visit didn't work out, but at least it wasn't because I was anxious to get home to my drawing board.)

At the end of every year since 1972, I've taken a photo of the year's front page headlines. One of this year's major front page stories was in Friday's newspapers (you may have heard of it), and I very much wanted to pick up a copy of the local paper.

Couldn't find one.

Not very long ago, one used to find a small stack of newspapers in the lobby of one's hotel, free as part of the cost of one's room. Once upon a time, it would be the local newspaper; then somehow every hotel agreed to stock USA Today. Now they don't even offer that. The young men at the front desk didn't even know where a newspaper might be sold.

Newspaper vending machines are a thing of the past now that the cost of a newspaper is well above the amount of change anyone carries in their pocket. There were no newspapers at the nearby gas station; the clerk told me that they only sold the paper on Sunday. Nor were there any newspapers at the nearest grocery store. The nearby Shoppe-ing Centre had a bookstore; no newspaper there. Maybe I should have checked any of the half a dozen coffee shoppes, but I wasn't in need of half a dozen overpriced cups of coffee.

Yesterday, I saw the premiere post on a new substack by fellow cartoonist Jack Ohman, writing from vacation in Hawai'i about trying to get away from the news. Yet, in spite of that, he apparently had no trouble in paradise coming up with a copy of the local paper.

From https://jackohman.substack.com/p/on-vacation-with-donald-trump

Was it because he was in a Blue State where they get their news from, well, the news, and I was in a Red State where they get their news from Trump Social?

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.

With Apologies to Garry Trudeau

 

Q Toon: Rainbow Alert

The United States Department of State issued a warning earlier this month of the possibility of some sort of terror attack targeting LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations in June. They were not, however, terribly specific about it.

I don't visit their STEP page often enough to know whether the orange bar atop this notice means that they're still using the color-coded alert system created by the Dubya Bush administration. Orange was pretty serious, as I recall.

But then, it's also the color of road construction notices.

Today's cartoon is not to dismiss the State Department warning in any way. You may recall that the State Department issued a similar warning of a possible terrorist attack in Russia that was ignored by the Putin regime, only for Islamist terrorists to kill 140 people at a Moscow rock concert.

Rather, the threat of attack is something that LGBTQ+ people — the genderqueer particularly — live with every day. Not a month goes by without news of a transgender person or two being murdered somewhere in the U.S. So-called honor killings of LGBTQ persons by members of their own families happen around the world, even here in America. And it's only a matter of time until some gundamentalist crackpot picketing outside a Pride event somewhere in this country snaps.

The possibility has to be kept in mind when we have men of the actual cloth spewing stuff like this at city council meetings:

 David Lettau, pastor of Country Gospel Church, read a passage from Romans 1 about “uncleanness” and then related it to the Pride Festival.

“What they’re doing is teaching perversion to our children,” Lettau said. “We as a city are responsible for making sure that no decadent and perverse things go on.”

Lettau then made his threat explicit.

“It’s worthy of death, it says in the Bible,” Lettau said.

No one from the city council challenged his words.

Later, Pastor Jeff Combs of the First Community Church of God lamented that he was being lumped in with people who hate, especially as he has “nothing but love for people who live any lifestyle” and once “had a gay friend.” He then told the council they would be in violation of state law if they allowed juveniles to be allowed to attend Pride.

“We will pursue the matter further,” Combs threatened. “This is about protecting children.”

The pastor then, too, grounded his threat in the Bible, citing Luke 17:2, a passage that suggests drowning someone who adversely influences children.

“It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck,” Combs said. “So watch yourselves. We are called to watch over our children.”

If I were Pastor Combs's gay friend, I'd be leery of accepting any invitation to join him at the beach.

The danger comes not just from the Christian Right, of course. The current Israel-Gaza War has heightened fears that some jihadi will be inspired to lash out against a soft target such as a Pride festival. June of 2016 saw the massacre at Orlando's Pulse nightclub by a gunman who variously pledged allegiance to Islamic State and to Hezbollah. We remember also the ultra-orthodox Jew who attacked Jerusalem Pride festival-goers in 2005 with a knife — and again ten years later.

So should we cancel Pride this year?

For centuries, queer people have faced jail, dungeons, torture, muggings, burning at the stake, stoning, death camps, having brick walls dumped on us, hangings, knifings, shootings, ostracization and ridicule.

Yet we're still here. Because love finds a way.

And that's why we celebrate Pride.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Mike Peterson over at the Daily Cartoonist linked to me twice over the weekend — many thanks, Mike! — the first to disagree somewhat with last week's cartoon of Harrison Butker's commencement address.

I think Mike's disagreement might have been that I lump all Catholics into one basket. I do realize that there are Francis Catholics and Benedict Catholics and never-accepted-Vatican-II Catholics and lapsed Catholics and recovering Catholics, but there wasn't much room for that distinction in the cartoon. There isn't much mystery as to which camp the Powers That Be at Benedictine College in ruby-red Kansas are in.

The various flavors of Catholicism were beside the point of the essay I wrote to accompany it; but point taken.

More amusing to me was some censorbot's decision at Bluesky that my retrospective a couple Saturdays ago which included versions of "The Kiss" by Klimt, Munch, and Rodin, was too risqué. Or perhaps it was as offended by its final panel of Michael Sam and his boyfriend smooching as the Karen in the cartoon trying to cover it up.

I can almost imagine some 14-year-old Bluesky user (yeah, right) clicking on the "Adult Content" warning thinking that there must be porn behind it.