Speaking of Derangement

I'm wondering how long it will be once the 118th Congress is gaveled into session before Eric Allie changes the cartoon on GoComics's link to his work.

Nuestra Sneak Peek de Guadalupe

I'm not complaining about this week's embarrassment of riches topic-wise, but couldn't we have saved one of these LGBTQ+ news stories until between the holidays when there's nothing to draw about?

Whatchamacallitude

My syndicated cartoon this week offered "trans derangement syndrome" as an alternative to the term "transphobia" to describe the near-pathological animus right-wing Republicans have toward transgender persons.

Ten Decembers ago, I offered this cartoon after the Associated Press stylebook decreed that the similar commonly used compound "homophobia" was off-limits to its reporters:

December, 2012

The AP's viewpoint was that a "phobia" is a clinical term that ought not to be applied to persons who have not been diagnosed as such by a professionally licensed psychologist. That a given antigay legislation, gay-bashing attack, or religious belief might be attributed to fear of homosexuals or homosexuality, moreover, is not an independently verifiable fact without an admission by the legislator, attacker, or believer responsible.

I rather liked "gaytred" and "lesbianimus," but I've never had any illusion that they would ever catch on. Meanwhile, the ever-expanding acronym on beyond LGBTQ+ will prevent any neologism devised to be inclusive about any attitude toward LGBTQ+ness. I guess "bigotry" will have to do.

April, 2016

The Supreme Court has taken up an astroturf "religious liberty" case this season. 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis concerns a webpage designer who doesn't want to abide by Colorado's non-discrimination law in case a same-sex couple should ever approach them to design a wedding webpage for them. 

Just to be clear: 303 Creative LLC has not ever been asked to design a wedding webpage for a same-sex couple. No same-sex couple is currently interested in having 303 Creative LLC design a wedding webpage for them. 303 Creative LLC had not been advertising itself as a Christian-based heterosexuals-only webpage design company. In fact, 303 Creative LLC has not yet designed any wedding webpages for anybody.

But the owner, Lorie Smith, wants to discriminate against same-sex couples, and has been encouraged by a right-wing Christianist legal group, Alliance Defending Freedom, to go to court to establish a right to Christian bigotry.

And it appears from their questions that the right-wing Christianist majority on the Court is predisposed to agree with them.

June, 2000

Oh, but how dare I impugn the motives of anyone who just want to impose their religious liberties on everybody else! Away with this talk of phobias, derangement syndromes, and bigotry! The Crusading Right has nothing but love for us heau-meau-sekshuls.

April, 2007

Q Toon: Tedious

It seems like eons ago that we coined the term "Obama Derangement Syndrome" to describe Republicans' irrational, virulent response to anything and everything about Barack Obama: from their embrace of birtherism even in the face of overwhelming evidence that our 44th President was indeed born in Hawaii, to their revulsion against his wife planting a vegetable garden, to their howls of shock and horror that time he wore a tan suit.

When the electoral college elected as president Donald Berzelius Trump, the most prominent flogger of birtherism's dead horse, right-wingers quickly purloined the idea of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" — as if there were something pathological about Americans being upset over having our country run by a solipsistic, self-serving, lying, cheating, boorish grifter who was using the presidency as a Keep Out Of Jail Free card while billing taxpayers to put up the Secret Service in his own personal hotel chain.

So, now that the party that was just fine and dandy with all that is now falling all over itself proclaiming transgender folks to be the biggest danger to the republic since affordable health care, I'm stealing "Derangement Syndrome" back.

This Week's Sneak Peek

There should (I hope) be some familiar faces in this week's syndicated cartoon.

I don't think they're singing Christmas carols.

Happy St. Nicholas's Eve!

Christmas Covers

Well, the weatherperson says it's now meteorological winter — and we can argue about just how much meteorology is affected by flipping to the last page of the calendar — so it's time for cartoonists great and small to crank out those holiday cartoons.

And that includes, somewhere on the scale, yours truly. If you've been following this here blog, you know that I've already drawn a Lauren Boebert Christmas card and Mike Lee on Santa's lap — and it was still meteorological autumn when I drew those.

Since it's Saturday, I've dug into the box of treasured holiday ornaments and to see what cartoons may be found, and I'm happy to report that there are some beloved old baubles in there. Chief among them are the full-page cartoons for the university newspapers for which I drew 30 and 40 years ago.

in UW-P Ranger, Dec. 9, 1982

This front page cartoon for the Ranger at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside was a great deal of fun to draw. All that lettering was considerably less fun (ditto for Mike Lee's wish list in this week's syndicated cartoon).

This was my second Christmas cover for the Ranger; the first, a parody of "Deck the Halls" the year before, didn't have quite as much calligraphy, or, for that matter, cross hatching.

in UWM Post, Nov. 23, 1992

Ten years thence, I drew the occasional cover illustration for the Post at University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Their Holiday Shopper issues came out in November rather than December, but who needs to rush the season, eh?

I've discussed before how any color in these Ranger and Post cartoons back in the pre-Photoshop stone ages was achieved with separate overlays for each color. In this case, some Post staffer, not me, cut acetate sheets to the shapes of the red and green spaces (and another for the gray tone in the little girl's hair; I'd have suggested a red halftone to keep things relatively simple). Kudos to whomever that person was for leaving the mortar between the bricks uncolored, and I've come to appreciate what a pain colorizing evergreen trees can be.

But that's some heavy lipstick on The King.

🎄

Normally, I'd continue here to post at least one cartoon each from Decembers of 2002 and 2012, but I don't have anything to continue today's theme. I didn't happen to have any commissions for holiday covers in those years.

Here's a regular-sized cartoon from 2002 anyway — even if, like that UWM Post cover, it was actually drawn in November.

Some of my clients only publish monthly, you know.

Q Toon: All He Wants for Christmas

The Respect for Marriage Act passed the U.S. Senate on Tuesday by a vote of  61 to 36. The Act, protecting same-sex and interracial marriages from being nullified by today's activist Supreme Court, won the support of twelve Republicans and all 49 of the Democrats present. (Sen. Rafael Warnock was home in Georgia campaigning in next week's run-off election. Two Republicans also did not vote.)

The bill now returns to the House, which passed it months ago but will need to reconcile with some differences between their version of the bill and the Senate's.

You may have thought that marriage equality was a settled issue. But you're not Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous’ … we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”

Thomas’s opinion set off alarm bells among proponents of marriage equality, who pointed out that if the Supreme Court were to overturn Obergefell, as it did Roe, then the right to same-sex marriage would similarly fall to the states. Currently 35 states have statutes or constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage that would go into effect if Obergefell were overturned, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit that advocates for LGBTQ equality.

So Senator Tammy Baldwin put together a bill that will require that even if the Supremes reverse Obergefell, if a same-sex or interracial couple were legally married in one state, their marriage doesn't magically disappear any time they happen to be in one of those 35 states.

In order to garner bipartisan support, the Senate version of the bill already had religious liberty guarantees. Baptist homeless shelters can still put lesbian couples back out on the street. Islamic food pantries can still refuse to admit gay couples. Ku Klux Kathedrals can still preach against miscegenation. Heck, if they want to, Catholic adoption agencies can still discriminate against legally married couples when one of them has been divorced.

But that wasn't enough for the 38 Senate Republicans who voted against the bill. Utah's Mike Lee was one of several Republicans arguing that antigay laypersons ought to be able to discriminate against same-sex and interracial couples, too, even in a completely secular capacity.

Who else is going to stand up for the rights of the Kim Davises of the world who think God is telling them to treat someone else's marriage as if it doesn't exist?

Requiring the state to recognize your marriage doesn't mean much if the people in charge can just make a cross with their fingers at you and now pronounce you single and stranger.

Fortunately, Lee's amendment, and the other poison pills were voted down. Yet I suspect they signal to Clarence Thomas and the others of his ilk how to argue that the Respect for Marriage Act is unconstitutional.

Stay tuned.