ArcaMax

In America's ongoing effort to separate the properly gendered from you freak jobs who are just making it up as you go along, we've finally struck on felines and fertility as the true measure of properly gendered patriotism.

You got cats? You got cats, there's some chance that you're not as male as the guy with a dog, particularly when compared to the guy with a pit bull.

If you're a woman, and you got cats, your seeds are dry, and you're a giggling, shrieking crone with a houseful of crystals and a headful of crap about your reproductive rights.

Got kids? Good. You're male as hell, even if you're raising some other guy's biological children. If you're female, just squirtin' 'em out means you HAVE to be a woman.

Once we figure out where you belong on the male/female chart, we move on to your "stake in the future of America."

If you got kids, you got a big stake in the future. You want little Schuyler and Madison to grow up in the best America possible. There's no telling from their first names which one is the girl, but little Schuyler and Madison are gonna get the best you can afford.

You buy them the best guns. You drive them to karate practice. You keep them away from those liberal books in the library. Dumb and dangerous is the way to go when you're raising children. You don't want anybody to grow up and write a poem.

See, if you have kids, you'll vote for things that will make America great again.

For the children.

My wife and I don't have kids, so it's assumed we will vote for candidates who will destroy America.

I mean, why not?

Well, one of the things that democracy assumes (hoo boy) is that you'll vote for things that are good for other people, even if they're not good for you.

I've voted for money to build a new high school no one I know will ever attend. Why? I thought we needed a new high school, and I was willing to pay my share. Why not? Everyone in America gets a free education, but we all have to pay for it together.

My father was a white man, but he voted for candidates who wanted to overturn segregation, way back there in the 1950s. He lived in Massachusetts, and there were hardly any Black people where he lived, so Pop wasn't exactly getting shoved around by Jim Crow, but he felt bad for Black people who couldn't vote and kept getting hanged from trees, so he voted for civil rights.

You don't have a bigger stake in the country if you have kids. You never have.

You have a big stake in the country because it's your country, and people left it to you, and you're not supposed to sell that for cheaper gasoline, or what's best for just your family.

You're supposed to be able to think about more than just you, and your kids, and your job. You're supposed to be able to think about what's best for all of us, even for other people's kids.

The front end of the dog needs to be fed. The back end of the dog needs to be walked. But it's the same dog.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.