Iowa court legalizes gay marriage
This is exactly what’s wrong with modern day judges:
The Iowa Supreme Court this morning upheld a Polk County judge’s 2007 ruling that marriage should not be limited to one man and one woman.
The ruling, viewed nationally and at home as a victory for the gay rights movement and a setback for social conservatives, means Iowa’s 5,800 gay couples can legally marry in Iowa beginning April 24.
There are no residency rules for marriage in Iowa, so the rule would apply to any couple who wanted to travel to Iowa.
Now, I’m speaking from the perspective of someone who actually believes societies should just legalize gay marriage. To me, marriage isn’t a concern of the government. It’s a spiritual bond, and a spiritual ‘contract.’ It’s between two individuals and their God. Not between them and their government. As such, the government should recognize whatever marriage is recognized by social institutions like churches and mosques.
But (since it is also between the individuals and their government in the West) never before have judges interpreted the Iowa nor the U.S. constitution in a way that gays can marry to each other. Marriage has always legally been explained as a contract between a man and a woman. If you believe same sex marriages should be legalized, you amend the constitution and / or pass (other) laws that legalize it. You don’t interpret the constitution in an entirely new manner because society won’t accept such changes.
It’s a sad day for those who believe in the rule of law.
Also be sure to read Ed Whelan’s and Hot Air’s take on it.
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Wonderful. As the brilliant Kinky Friedman puts it – gays should have the right to be as miserable as the rest of us.
“You don’t interpret the constitution in an entirely new manner because society won’t accept such changes.”
Yeah, I wonder how long the ending of segregation would have taken if you had to trudge through the “minds” of people who had never spoken a word to a black person and were very comfortable with the Status Quo.
“It’s a sad day for those who believe in the rule of law.”
I realize the idea that these legalistic triumphs are a lot less stable and more artificial than winning hearts and minds – Andrew Sullivan has posited many arguments for the latter approach, and I can’t exactly call him biased against gays. But if it were me being told *that I was a secondary, “special” citizen* by my government I wouldn’t exactly relish the idea of having to wait for a sufficient amount of people to get over the idea of not discriminating me.
Consensus has no objective value. Yes, democratic countries accept consensus in elections to be the only real option. But it has no objective value – 99 % could have morally reprehensible positions, and that must not be reflected in the attitudes of the government and the institutions into which our children will be born.
It’s not ideal, not even for the people whom I side with here (the gay couples and their backers), but I’ll take this “judicial activism” over the affirmation of the notion that 11,600 human beings don’t really cut it love-wise. This is an important step in reducing the small but steady stream of abuse that people with the gumption to be born differently have to endure. I find this decision to be morally and societally sound.
Hm, I immediately regretted those quotation marks. Of course those people had minds. They have just been misled and in some cases exploited by far scarier and even homo-hating people.
I just can’t see any difference between the law that has now been revoked and the laws that were once put in place against miscegenation and for segregation. People will one day look back and wonder what the heck took so long.
I live in small town Gowrie, Iowa and have been following this case and have emails from Iowa One to keep me up to date on the issues. I was thrilled to see the unanimously ruling 7-0, which like the Brown v Topeka, 1954 was also unanimous U.S. Supreme Court case that helps to show that all the justices agreed with the ruling. I was active in many struggles in Kansas City for over forty years plus four demonstrations beginning with the attempt to get the city council to pass a civil right statute to protect gays from being fired from their jobs or evicted from their apartments because they were gay or lesbian. I lived in an apartment in 1964 where most of the tenants were gay men and I told my coworkers about the loving relationship that I noticed among them. Later at the New Earth bookstore I got to know some lesbians quite well. In 1974 the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatry Association both published votes by the overwhelming majority of their members that stated that studies showed that gays and lesbians were natural attracted to the same sex and that they did not “choose” this as a lifestyle. Many people are not as well informed nor does our society institutions help to play a possible role in the education of the majority. I seems that we have to overcome our society to learn in spite of our culture.