Q Toon: Gettin' Jiggery-Pokery With It

When I read Jen Sorensen's email about drawing a cartoon for Fusion about the Supreme Court's decision for marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges, I only had time to draw one cartoon before her deadline and Q Syndicate's. (My drawing LGBT-themed cartoons for anyone other than Q Syndicate is also something of a contractual issue.) Had my time and my relationship with my editors been freer, I could easily have made two separate cartoons out of this one:

The idea on the left side of the cartoon is essentially a follow-up to the cartoon I drew last October illustrating Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s quotation about the arc of history bending toward justice. In an early sketch of this week's cartoon, the dissenting justices on the right side of the drawing were sitting on a porch in rocking chairs, shaking their fists at nothing in particular; no rainbow, no pot of gold wedding bands.

Now, I could argue that the rainbow clarifies what the topic of the cartoon is. The Supremes issued major rulings one on top of another last week, and people could get confused. (Heck, some people are sure to get confused. Chip Bok drew a cartoon yesterday about Justice Roberts's Obamacare ruling, and no small number of the commenters at GoComics thought it was somehow about marriage equality instead.)

I did, after all, include Justice Scalia's "jiggery-pokery" epithet in my cartoon, even though it came not from his Obergefell dissent but from his fulmination against Chief Justice Roberts's King v. Burwell opinion. I did try to find some equally obscure contumely in Scalia's Obergefell dissent to use instead, but Scalia had apparently misplaced his English-to-Flobbadob dictionary when writing it and settled for "Go ask a hippie."

By the way, when researching what I wanted to say in this blog entry, I looked up the dissenting opinions in the court's 1967 Loving v. Virginia case, which ruled unconstitutional state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. I couldn't find any, because there were none. That court's ruling was unanimous.

Judging from the four, count 'em, four dissenting opinions in Obergefell, I'd be willing to bet that there would have been a dissenting opinion in Loving had Roberts, Scalia, Thomas or Alito traveled back in time to sit on the high court in 1967.