Earlier this week, the Seattle Times deemed a Doonesbury story line about Texas' anti-abortion law too controversial to run on its comics page; instead, the paper opted to move the comic strip to its national news section, to protect children, in executive editor David Boardman's words, from "graphic" material.

In a statement , Boardman said, "Trudeau's stock in trade is commentary on the issues of the day, and this is certainly one. But because we are concerned about these strips reaching the right audience, and in particular about giving parents a good option to keep them from their children if they wish, we are moving Doonesbury to Page A2 for this week."

The Texas law requires any woman seeking an abortion to submit to a transvaginal ultrasound—a procedure that involves being prodded for several minutes with a ten-inch plastic wand. The Doonesbury plot line involves a woman, seeking an abortion, who is subjected to a series of increasingly embarrassing interventions, culminating (on Thursday) with an "examin[ation] with a 10" shaming wand" by a doctor who intones, "By the authority invested in me by the GOP base, I thee rape.”

Rape. That's a pretty serious subject for a comic strip. So, you might think, is gun violence. However, despite the fact that today's top local headline was about an 8-year-old girl who was accidentally shot by a classmate (the mother is being charged with third-degree assault) who brought a gun to school, the Times saw fit to run a comic strip today making light of gun violence (and, incidentally, drunkenness):



What's the difference between joking about the Republicans' attacks on abortion rights and joking about killing a drunk person with a gun? According to Boardman, "by an early age, most kids have had some discussion with their parents about guns, and they’ve certainly been exposed to images of them in various venues. I can’t say the same for transvaginal examinations and rape."

Boardman adds: "Unlike many newspapers, we chose not to withhold these strips from our readers. We simply moved them to a place we thought was more appropriate."