Lake County Democrats used a term that’s become prominent in national party rhetoric by denouncing a cartoon recently distributed in a Vernon Township Republican newsletter as “weird,” while also saying the image makes light of issues, including domestic violence.
The cartoon, printed at the bottom of an early August newsletter from the Vernon Township Republicans, depicts a bruised and bloodied woman in a “Vote Blue” T-shirt who is side-eyed by a donkey with a man’s body. The donkey figure sports a “BLM” (Black Lives Matter) neck tattoo and the words “War,” “Open Border,” “Cost of Living” and “Crime” on its body, and is drinking from a bottle labeled “Debt.”
“B–ch, you ain’t gonna leave me, right?” the donkey asks the woman, who appears to be beaten to the kitchen floor.
“As long as I can have abortions,” the woman responds in the second frame, her nose bloody.
“This is both creepy and, yes …. weird,” Sheila Sebor, chair of the Vernon Township Democrats, wrote of the cartoon in a statement.
“Weird and disturbing,” Lauren Beth Gash, chair of the Lake County Democrats, said. State Rep. Daniel Didech of Buffalo Grove called the cartoon “offensive, outrageous, and downright weird.”
Didech said the cartoon also was “dismissing very real concerns about reproductive freedom” among local women.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Vernon Township Republicans issued a statement calling the cartoon “a lapse in judgment.”
“Internal documents are often prepared in haste, without enough forethought, especially without intent for public consumption,” the organization said, adding that it would donate $250 to A Safe Place, a local nonprofit that works with victims of domestic violence.
Other aid groups for victims of domestic violence had joined Democrats in denouncing the cartoon’s use of violent imagery.
North Suburban Legal Aid Clinic Executive Director Susan Shulman said that while the clinic cannot comment on politics, “we unequivocally stand against domestic violence in any form.”
“Depictions of violence, whether in media, cartoons, or elsewhere, contribute to a culture that normalizes abuse, which is deeply troubling,” Shulman said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the Zacharias Center for Sexual Abuse, which has locations in Gurnee and Skokie, criticized the cartoon as “propaganda” that “makes light of the very serious situation.”
The image was signed by SKS Cartoon, an account that posts cartoons mostly from a conservative or pro-Donald Trump perspective. A version of the cartoon posted on the social media platform X received some 36,000 likes.
Gash, who is also a former judiciary chair in the Illinois House of Representatives, drew a line between the cartoon and what she called an “anti-choice, anti-woman platform” pushed by Republicans.
She noted that Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance several years ago criticized laws that ease the divorce process. Proponents say ending no-fault divorce could make leaving relationships more complicated and even dangerous for people experiencing abuse.
“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is this idea that, well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally — they were maybe even violent but certainly they were unhappy, and so getting rid of them, and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,” Vance said in a speech three years ago. “And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical, but it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.”
The Zacharias Center spokesperson said the image distributed by Vernon Township Republicans “did a good job if they’re trying to shock people.”
But “find another way to make your point,” the spokesperson said.
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