Iowa, home of tall corn and sturdy Americans, no-nonsense kind of place, where I once drove a tractor as a kid, stopping at the family farm of my dad's law partner, trailering our way across the country in the summer of '56. Sensible place, not taken much to crazy ideas. Not much in the way of elitists there. Patriots, all of them; churches with white wooden steeples hold down the edges of fields. Iowans are solid and steady; it's a place for combines, not conflagrations.
Their Supreme Court ruled, unanimously, that outlawing same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. Along with them, and those celebrating it, I raise my voice in a throaty and happy cry to say the obvious: DUH.
If we are a country of laws -- and we are; if we hold as ideal belief in equal justice under the law -- and we do; if we believe in separation of church and state... well, there was a time, anyway... then there's simply no other conclusion to draw. Depriving certain law-abiding citizens of a right given to everyone else, based only on a religious belief that they are evil, or on wholly unsupportable and unproven claims that giving them that same right threatens that of others, is by my reckoning immoral. And, most certainly, illegal under our laws.
I understand homosexuality makes some people uncomfortable (the more uncomfortable, the more likely -- so it seems -- to join a church and practice it under the cloth, one might conclude); I accept that to some the Bible calls it a sin (even though there's much else in the Bible that those people conveniently ignore). To the extent that they choose to live their lives with those prejudices, I say, go for it. It's when they take it outside their homes or churches and into the public square that I -- and those judges, and everyone with a couple of honest brain cells to rub together -- must draw the line. If you don't believe in gay marriage, don't do it.
Well, people say, this isn't for the courts to decide. It's judicial activism (my favorite legal term, which means "judges ruling against you.") No. It's not. We have appeals courts because our founders knew people can be mean, nasty, and ruled by mobs. The ability of judges to rule unconstitutional laws which are UNCONSTITUTIONAL has been a basic principle of our legal system since Marbury v. Madison.
To people able to see facts -- a universe less densely populated in the US than in most other Western countries -- it's pretty clear that homosexuality is not a choice. They're as intelligently designed as the rest of us, one might say. And from that it follows that you can't catch it, or get recruited into it. It just is. And when you take stock of the openly gay among us, we're a much better society for the gifts they give.
As much as we hear, over and over, like tax cuts increasing revenue and other modern-day right-wing shibboleths, that same-sex marriage is a threat to the institution of marriage, I've yet to hear any actual argument that shows why that is so. Nor any evidence from places where it's allowed, that "traditional" marriage has been diminished. I rejoice in the idea of it, and so does my wife of thirty-eight years.
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