Stacking the Triskaidekaitis

I first drew about the appointment of Roger Severino to the civil rights office of Health and Human Services last March. Severino, previously a lobbyist for the right-wing Heritage Foundation, has been an agitator against marriage equality and the treating transgender persons with any humanity or respect.

“On the basis of religious teachings, moral reasoning, scientific evidence, and medical experience, many have strong grounds to hold that one’s sex is an immutable characteristic,” Severino and a co-author wrote in a Heritage Foundation report in January 2016. “Many involved in providing medical care and those enrolled in health insurance plans have serious objections to participating in or paying for sex-reassignment surgeries or gender transitions.”

Last week, Severino announced the creation of a "Conscience and Religious Freedom Division" within his office

to ensure that health care providers are allowing workers to opt out of procedures when they have religious or moral objections. The new division would be a third, co-equal branch with the office's existing two divisions that focus on federal civil rights laws and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Severino and his Conscience and Religious Freedom ("Condom" for short) Division will come to the defense of America's beleaguered and persecuted Christian minority, ensuring that Christian health care workers will no longer be forced to violate their fundamental religious beliefs. No more will Baptist podiatrists be transferred to the Abortion Unit. Catholic pharmacists will no longer have to fill morning-after pill prescriptions for divorcees. Pentecostal dishwashers in the hospital cafeteria need not live in fear of transgender visitors asking them for directions to the ladies' room — wait, you say that's not the problem?

But longtime HHS officials say that the existing civil rights office was more than capable of handling these issues and that creating an entire division to focus on religious liberty sends the wrong message.
"This is a classic solution in search of a problem," said one official who's handled civil rights issues at HHS. "And it’s a problem that doesn’t really exist, because hospitals tend to be really compliant on this kind of stuff."
During the Obama administration, evangelical groups had even hailed HHS for its efforts to enforce religious freedom, such as intervening in a lawsuit filed by an anti-abortion nurse against Mount Sinai Health System in New York.

But if you thought my examples were silly, go back and read that excerpt from Severino's Heritage Foundation report again.

"[T]hose enrolled in health insurance plans have serious objections to ... paying for sex-reassignment surgeries or gender transitions"?

If you think about what Severino is saying there, it's that anyone paying for health insurance ought to have the right to object to somebody else's health care.

Just because your faith leads you to abstain from pork doesn't mean you have a right to stop your health insurance company from covering someone else's hospital visit for trichinosis.

You may have a religious commitment to pacifism, but you don't get to sue to get your premiums back if your insurance company pays for a veteran's PTSD treatment.

And if your god tells you to be vigilant against transgender cooties but your insurance company pays for the estrogen treatments of someone on the other side of town, tough. It's none of your damned business.

Q Toon: Rogerino Severino

As the wreckage of the Astronomical Health Costs Act smoldered in the foreground, Donald Joffrey Trump surreptitiously appointed anti-LGBT activist Roger Severino as head of Health and Human Services' Office of Civil Rights last week. While Devin Nunes's Russian clown act has diverted the attention of other cartoonists, I decided that Mr. Severino deserved a little notice.

Severino most recently served as director of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. There he focused on "religious liberty, marriage and life issues" at the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society. 

(Why, yes, the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society is where TrumpCorp. found Education Secretary Betsy Devos. But I digress.) ...

Severino has been vocal in his opinions about the civil rights of transgender people. He authored several reports speaking out against LGBT rights, including a 2016 report that criticized a proposed Obama administration rule to prevent discrimination against transgender patients within the healthcare system.
He's also authored multiple blog posts for the Daily Signal, where he consistently spoke out against White House provisions that protected LGBT groups from discrimination.

For example, in this Daily Signal post last year defending North Carolina's Bathroom Bill, Severino complained:

These developments prove that same-sex marriage was merely the start, not end, of the left’s LGBT agenda. The radical left is using government power to coerce everyone, including children, into pledging allegiance to a radical new gender ideology over and above their right to privacy, safety, and religious freedom.

For the Trump administration, whose EPA has declared war on the environment, whose health care reform sought to deprive people of health care, and whose education policy is to defund public schools, it should surprise nobody that they would turn Civil Rights over to the Christian Taliban.

Q Toon: Now You See It

Shortly after I posted this cartoon to Q Syndicate, news of the Supreme Court's 6-3 decision that legal protections for LGBTQ employees are constitutional. Their rather surprising ruling, written by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, has overshadowed the Trump administration's having finalized rules eliminating nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ persons in health care and health insurance.

"HHS respects the dignity of every human being, and as we have shown in our response to the pandemic, we vigorously protect and enforce the civil rights of all to the fullest extent permitted by our laws as passed by Congress," said Roger Severino, who directs the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services, in a written statement announcing that the HHS rule had become final. The rule is set to go into effect by mid-August.
It is one of many rules and regulations put forward by the Trump administration that defines "sex discrimination" as only applying when someone faces discrimination for being female or male, and does not protect people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"), prohibits discrimination in health coverage and care. It bans discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, and disability in health programs and activities that receive federal funding. That these protections include transgender persons is supported by a rule adopted by HHS in 2016 and by most lower courts.

The Corrupt Trump Administration's repeal of the 2016 rule has been a long time coming, however; this is the fourth cartoon I've drawn in as many years about Severino and his determination to allow discrimination against LGBTQ patients and insurance consumers. "We're going back to the plain meaning of those terms, which is based on biological sex," Severino said in 2017, adding that the rule could save hospitals and insurers and others $2.9 billion over five years since they will be relieved of the requirement to print notices of nondiscrimination in several languages.

Under the new rule, a transgender person could, for example, be refused care for a checkup at a doctor's office, said Lindsey Dawson, associate director of HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. Other possible scenarios include a transgender man being denied treatment for ovarian cancer, or a hysterectomy not being covered by an insurer — or costing more when the procedure is related to someone's gender transition.

Whether this week's court decision will have any impact on Mr. Severino's new rules will depend on having another lawsuit work its way up to the Supremes. The National Center for Transgender Equality is putting on a brave front, but anything can happen. This week's cases turned on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which deals expressly with employment issues and specifically includes protections against sex discrimination. Health care falls under Title VI of the Act, which does not mention sex discrimination.

Will that be enough for Justices Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh to lasso Roberts and Gorsuch back to the right-wing corral? It is not as if any of them have a great deal of sympathy for Obamacare to begin with.

Q Toon: Small Enough to Fit in Your Genes

You've probably heard by now that the Corrupt Trump Administration plans to issue an executive order decreeing that gender is an immutable characteristic decided in the womb. That is to say that the order will decree transgender individuals out of existence.

The New York Times learned of the ruling through a memo circulated in the Department of Human Services, home of the rabidly anti-lgbtq Roger Severino and the Religious Liberty University, er, Task Force. Should the proposal be approved by DHS, the Departments of Education, Justice and Labor are expected to follow suit.

This affects more than just telling transgender people to use the wrong bathroom. It could affect the kind of medical treatment transgender patients may receive under Medicaid (assuming there's anything left of Medicaid once Republicans are done with it), or which prisons transgender inmates might be sentenced to. It could even disenfranchise the whole lot of them by requiring them to try to vote using their dead names, if they can get past the poll worker convinced that Glen is trying to impersonate Glenda or vice versa.

Perhaps I'm being unfair linking this anti-transgender policy to Donald Berzilius Trump. It's of great interest to the theocrats in his administration — Severino, Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, and that ilk — but doesn't benefit Trump or his family personally.

On the other hand, it reverses a policy of the Obama administration, and Trump is more than eager to erase any vestige of his immediate predecessor, no matter what.

If Obama had built that wall across our southern border, Trump would be foaming at the mouth to tear it down.

One More Reminder

I can’t believe that four years after the last time we were here on the precipice, our Graphical History Tour has to repeat this stop. But apparently there are a lot of Americans whose memories of the Donald Berzelius Trump administration are not just hazy, but positively gauzy.

March, 2016

His immediate priority upon assuming office in 2017 was to staff many of his cabinet departments with people opposed to those departments' missions.

March, 2017

For the Department of Education, public education foe Betsy DeVos.

March, 2017

For the Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights, civil rights foe Roger Severino. 

Few of us noticed Trump also tossing the Obama administration's preparations for pandemic response into the garbage. But have no fear. Trump is promising to put brain worm-addled Robert "Let's Strap A Rotting Whale Carcass On Top Of The Car And Drive Down The Highway" Kennedy Jr. in charge of the nation's health in his second reich.

June, 2017

Starting under Administrator Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency abandoned its mission, repealing nearly 100 environmental protection rules and regulations.

July, 2018

And then there was the Trump foreign policy. Bashing our NATO allies. Fawning over Kim Jong Il. Keeping even his translator out of his private meeting with Vlad the Defenestrator, his handler at the Kremlin.

I don't even have a cartoon about the time he wanted to bomb Mexico and pretend someone else did it.

March, 2020

Then, we come to the defining moment of his presidency, the COVID-19 pandemic. His first reaction, as it has been with immigration, was to wall off the whole country against foreigners, returning tourists and business people, imports, birds, and wind. When it became painfully obvious even to Trump that it was too late for that, he discovered that he could be the center of attention by going on television every day to promise that the pandemic would miraculously be over by Easter. Then summer. Then Columbus Day.

April, 2020

He spouted ridiculous phony cures, from horse tranquilizer to bleach to shining bright lights up everybody's ass. And the death toll kept mounting. Although Kim Jong Un did not end up on that list.

We didn't know that Secret Agent Trump sent a COVID-19 test machine to Putin at Kremlin headquarters when they were still scarce in the country he supposedly wanted to make great again.

October, 2020

Turned out that Trump was COVID-positive himself when he appeared on stage to debate Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Trump's utterly unhinged performance that night was but a foretaste of the shitshow Trump and his gangsters thrust upon the nation after we decisively voted to toss him out of office. Refusing to concede, he sent his consiglieres to argue a pack of lies in the courthouses, on the airwaves, and over the intertubes.

January, 2021

The cartoons I drew of Trump protesting his election loss paled next to the riot he fomented at the U.S. Capitol. The assaults on police officers. The wanton vandalism. The threats to kill the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and any other member of Congress they might happen to stumble upon.

The Senators who were sent scurrying for their lives only to come back and decide that no impeachable offense had ever occurred.

February, 2024

Revenge upon his political enemies as a campaign theme wouldn't poll well, to Trump decided to make vilification of darker-skinned immigrants the primary focus of Trump 2024. The issue was so important that he made sure that the bipartisan immigration reform bill hammered out in Congress never made it to the floor of the House.

September, 2024

Just in case those brown-skinned immigrants miraculously stopped showing up at the southern border, Trump had another target for persecution: American transgender persons. 

Oh, I haven't even gotten around to his stealing thousands of classified government documents he had never gotten around to reading and stashing them in his bathroom, ballroom, and garden shed. Or his holding Puerto Rico hurricane relief funds for ransom, then showing up to throw paper towels at people. Or his history of sexual assaults. Or his 34 felony convictions.

I could repost more cartoons, but frankly, this post is way over the limit already.

For now, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that enough Americans will decide that Donald the Grouch Trump was in the wrong end of that big ass garbage truck this week.

Q Toon: The Beauty of the System

Last week, the Corrupt Trump Administration issued a new rule granting health care workers the right to do no weal if they can claim that patient care would impinge on their religious sensibilities.

Lambda Legal warns that, “The proposed rule also shields health care providers even if they refuse to give a referral after denying care, regardless of the consequences to the patient, and in violation of medical and ethical requirements and standards of care.”

The move is part of the right-wing Republican obsession to deny women control of their own bodies and to promote discrimination against LGBTQ people — transgender persons in particular. Except, of course, that it's not about us; it's about the poor, persecuted Christian majority.

Roger Severino, the director of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights, defended the new rule, saying it “does not create new substantive rights,” rather it “gives life and enforcement tools to existing federal conscience protections that have been on the books for decades.”
“We have not seen the hypotheticals that some have used to criticize the rule actually develop in real life,” he told NBC News in an email. “The beauty of the American system is that there are options for everyone. This rule promotes that principle by ensuring greater diversity in health care so that patients can continue to find doctors who match their values, and for example, OBGYNs are not excluded from the practice of medicine simply because they stand on the side of defending unborn human life.”

The rule protects not only doctors and nurses, but also pharmacists, insurance providers, and, yes, EMTs. Even if your doctor has no religious objection to prescribing your hormonal or immunotheraputic drugs, you may have to travel across the state to find a pharmacist willing to fill out your prescription.

And it's not as if insurance companies have any shortage of excuses for denying coverage already.

Pray that your premiums haven't been going to fund a company bought out by a cult of antivaxxer voodoo Scientologists.

Q Toon: Ad Insultiam

There's a month to go until Election Day, and Republicans have broken out the transphobia on TV.

The Trump campaign has begun running trans-bashing ads charging that Kamala Harris supports transgender therapy for children "without their parents' consent," as well as gender corrective surgery for prison inmates and undocumented immigrants. The ads include footage of Harris answering questions from a transgender interviewer (Wait — isn't the Republican knock on Harris that she won't sit down for interviews?) followed by still shots of her with drag performers — at least one of which doesn't look photoshopped together — and Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine.

You may not recognize Levine’s name; but transphobes find her every bit as frightening as those of us on the other side found Roger Severino in Trump’s HHS. And rest assured that right-wing media are holding her up as a scary bugaboo every chance they can get.

Here in Wisconsin, Republican senatorial candidate Eric Hovde and the PACs supporting him have been running ads making the same accusations against Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin. One assumes that Republicans are running this as a one-size-fits-all ad against other Democrats in close races around the country; Baldwin just happens to be one of the most prominent LGBTQ+ candidates this year.

We creative types gripe about AI — Artificial Intelligence — infringing on our turf. Someone quipped something to the effect of AI allowing wealth access to creativity without allowing creativity access to wealth. Or something like that. I tried googling it, but Google just gave me inspirational quotations about attaining financial security.

Anyway, you'll miss us creative types when we're gone, I promise you. But nobody is going to shed a tear when AI puts the campaign admeisters out of work. I half suspect that the emails flooding my inbox from Sherrod Brown (personal!), Elisa Slotkin, Jon Tester, Tim Walz, Barack Obama, Michele Obama, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Adam Kinzinger, Gwen Walz, Doug Emhoff, Chasten Buttigieg, and Moo Dang, the baby hippopotamus, each of them supposedly writing me ten or twelve times a day, must be spewed forth from AI servers in Cupertino. Some guy probably fed in the parameters to Watson 9000 four or five years ago: show me a desperate candidate up against a funding deadline and facing a barrage of attacks by a menacing cabal threatening all that America holds dear. 

I doubt that anyone will shed a tear if and when the job of grinding out political attack ads gets snatched away from the Don Drapers and Darrin Stephenses of Madison Avenue and K Street. Turning the work over to soulless mainframes in the cloud instead of the soulless operatives doing it now might scarcely be noticed by the rest of us.

Unless we happen to spot the surplus fingers and triple-jointed hips in the grainy, slow motion, black-and-white videos of Candidates X.

Q Toon: Praise the Lord and Pass the Regulation

If nothing else, the Corrupt Trump Administration, for all its craziness and criminality, delivered for the right-wing "religious liberty" crowd. They carried him into power and has been unshakable in its loyalty to him throughout these four ghastly years, no matter how many pussies he boasted of grabbing, how many blatant lies he told, or how many of the seven deadly sins he could squeeze into a single tweet.

On Thursday, the day after Trump's Qult followers assaulted the Capitol, the Department of Health and Human Services finalized rules giving faith-based organizations the green light to discriminate against LGBTQ citizens at will. 

Most prominently, the new regulation would allow taxpayer-funded child welfare services to refuse placement into LGBTQ families or discriminate against LGBTQ youth. Religiously affiliated adoption and foster care centers have been pushing for this change in regulation, including Catholic Social Services in Philadelphia, which currently has a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court seeking a First Amendment right to reject same-sex couples on religious grounds.

This hardly comes as a surprise; Trump appointees who came into office at HHS arrived with a solid record of pushing back against LGBTQ rights. To head HHS's Office of Civil Rights, Trump brought in anti-LGBTQ activist Roger Severino, who has shown up in this here blog a handful of times.

Thursday's regulations had to be tweaked after first being published last June in order to satisfy the Supreme Court ruling in a couple of civil rights cases. The later addition of a fourth Justice likely to join Alito, Kavanaugh, and Thomas in dissent may not yet be enough to overturn last summer's ruling.

There, too, the religious right got what it wanted out of their thrice married failed casino owner who couldn't find Two Corinthians with a concordance.

By the way, I kind of expected some blowback over including a nun in this cartoon. But that was before I saw photos of Sisters of Our Lady of the Blessed Stable Genius indeed among the Qult of Trump at his rally.

h/t Jeff Parker

Probably antifa, right?

Has It Only Been Four Years?

January, 2017

Instead of reaching back a century for classic editorial cartoons, or a few decades for my early work, your faithful servant today limits today's post to the first two years of the Corrupt Trump Administration. His has been an extraordinarily long quadrennium, and it might be easy to have forgotten just how gawdawful his presidency was in the days before impeachment (remember that?) and COVID-19.

January, 2017

Donald Berzelius Trump's first priorities upon taking office was to erase every trace of Barack Obama's presidency, and one of the earliest things to disappear was the White House LGBT Liaison office and its corresponding web page.

March, 2017

From Day One, the principal qualification for cabinet and sub-cabinet posts in the Corrupt Trump Administration has been complete and total opposition to the department or agency one would be placed in charge of.

March, 2017

That includes Roger Severino, who is still in charge of dismantling HHS's Office for Civil Rights, and Betsy DeVos, still in charge of defunding public education.

March, 2017

Fossil fuel fanatic Scott Pruitt left the Environmental Protection Agency under a cloud of ethics violations in 2018. His replacement, coal industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, is hardly any improvement.

October, 2017

As Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions led the Corrupt Trump Administration's assault on the rights of minorities, especially the LGBTQ community. His one saving grace was that he did not see himself as the Trump family's personal lawyer, which is why he was replaced by lickspittle William Barr.

August, 2017

Trump has expended a lot of energy targeting transgender persons in general, and especially in the U.S. military. One of his justifications he gave for working to drum transgender personnel out of the military was the "tremendous" cost of their medical treatment... the total of which has proved to be far, far less than the cost of Trump's frequent golf trips. 

January, 2018

By the way, it was an exceptionally crass Trump tweet in June, 2017, alleging that a female cable TV host had been bleeding from cosmetic surgery, that got me to vow always to draw Trump with a pig's snout. His tweet came on top of a vulgar tweet about another female cable TV host menstruating, another tweet remarking that a female Republican senate candidate's face repulsed voters, and a retweet of a meme contrasting a flattering photo of Melania Trump with an unflattering one of a Republican senator's wife.

There was a flurry of pig-Trump cartoons that week; I have kept it as a leitmotif ever since, even when reconciling the snout with the needed facial expression was a real challenge. I have often also given him pig's hooves, thus breaking away from the editorial cartoon cliché of drawing him with tiny hands.

July, 2018

Let us not forget Trump's foreign policy, which consists largely of pissing off our democratic allies and sucking up to autocratic dictators. Especially the murderous ones.

July, 2018

You thought I was pivoting from foreign policy to the topic of our judicial system, didn't you? Well, perhaps you were right.

November, 2018

Through it all, Trump has behaved like a petty dictator, which explains his affinity for dictators abroad. He has been assisted by the Republican politburo in the House and Senate, and their mission to pack the courts with right-wing activists (which we discussed here more fully on Thursday).

January, 2018

Within the White House, we have Trump's Ministry of Truth, demonstrating why it's not such a great idea to run government like a business.

August, 2018