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Loading ...Gay marriage goes before Iowa Supreme Court
12.08.2008 8:52am EST
(Des Moines, Iowa) The Iowa Supreme Court this week will hear arguments in a case challenging the state’s ban on same-sex marriage.
Both sides on the marriage issue will be given 30 minutes on Tuesday to make their arguments. It is the first state Supreme Court to hear a same-sex marriage case since California voters last month overturned a high court ruling that struck down that state’s ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional.The Iowa case centers around a state appeal of a ruling by a Polk County judge that struck down a state law limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples.
Six same-sex Iowa couples went to court in 2005 after the Polk County recorder denied them marriage licenses.
Last year County Judge Robert Hanson ruled that the law violated the constitutional rights of due process and equal protection.
Less than two hours after the the ruling, two Des Moines men applied for a marriage license, found a judge to waive the waiting period, and were married.
Hanson then stayed his ruling until the state could appeal it to the Iowa Supreme Court. The marriage of Sean Fritz and Tim McQuillan remains the only legal same-sex marriage in the state.
Lambda Legal, which represents the six couples said it is cautiously optimistic the Supreme Court will uphold Hanson’s ruling. Lambda attorney Camilla Taylor noted that the Iowa court traditionally has led the nation on civil rights issues, pointing out that the Iowa justices struck down a ban on interracial marriage more than a century before the U.S. Supreme Court declared such laws unconstitutional.
“This is not even a close constitutional call,” Taylor told The Des Moines Register. “If you examine the law in other states, the case law in Iowa is at least as strong, if not stronger. The Iowa Supreme Court has made it clear from its inception that the law includes broader guarantees of equality than federal law.
In a separate case, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled in January that co-adoptions by same-sex parents were legal.
The case involved a lesbian couple who had split up. While they were together, one partner had adopted as a co-parent the children of her partner. When the relationship ended, the birth mother asked a court if the other woman had visitation rights and could be compelled to pay child support.
A lower court ruled that co-adoptions by same-sex couples were illegal and threw out the case. The Supreme Court disagreed and ordered the lower court to revisit the case.
The issue of gay marriage has prompted Republicans and socially conservative groups to press for an amendment to the state constitution to limit marriage to opposite-sex couples.
Democrats who control the legislature have thwarted GOP demands they take up the proposed amendment. House Speaker Pat Murphy (D) has said he is in no rush to bring in legislation.
To amend the Iowa Constitution, simple majorities are needed in both the House and Senate in two consecutive general assemblies and then it must be approved by a simple majority of voters in the following general election.
Polls show that most Iowans would support civil unions, but not marriage, for same-sex couples.
Civil marriages are civil unions. We don’t need another type just because some or even most people aren’t comfy sharing the law with their gay neighbors — mostly for religious traditionalistic reasons that have no bearing on law in a nontheocratic government. A tradition of injustice is an argument for changing it faster, not clinging to it prolonging people’s pain and suffering — and the suffering is real, unlike the unproven, theoretical dire threats of consequences the ban proponents always make and which never prove to be real. Real seniors lose their homes, real children lose their other parent when something happens to their birth parent, real seriously ill people are denied the comfort of their most loved one as they lay dying, and real couples are made strangers to the benefits of literally tens of thousands of laws.
Kim: O.K. Trollzilla, I think narrow minded people are irresponsible and disgusting. How about you move to a country where traditional marriage is really practiced. Just as it has been for thousands of years. Women have no rights and, are sold by their fathers to the man that offers the most livestock.
Tom in Long Beach
Kim,
Why are you even looking at this site? Take your hateful venom-spewing somewhere else. France, maybe?
GayVotesCount wrote:
—When will America wake up and remember the basic concepts that this country was founded on? As Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote, “the very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities … One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote.”—
I concur, but this is the religious right we’re talking about here. These brainwashed zombies, while boldly claiming to believe in and uphold “God’s Law,” completely write off the existence of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS-(widely rumored to represent God’s TRUE word)-choosing, instead, to embrace a book-(the bible)-with “laws” written by men thousands of years dead in their graves. Funny how man can somehow cook up all these alleged, unfounded sins concerning homosexuality…and yet we have the TEN COMMANDMENTS, mandates that these very same people have fought and scratched to ban from public display at courthouses and libraries! I’ve meticulously studied all ten of these commandments, and NONE of them mention ANYTHING about gay people. These self-righteous heathens go out of their way to impose their steadfast religious bigotry upon this entire society while, at the same time, daring to imply that it is the gay community who is on the attack against “moral America!”
Hypocrisy at its most pathetic!
I can only hope common sense prevails in Iowa. Massachusetts, Connecticutt, and Canada are still thriving as successfully as they ever have. Fire and brimstone has not rained down from the heavens, and life still goes on pleasantly for everybody. Sane, rational-thinking people already realize this. But, as I’ve already alluded, these religious degenerates, who insist placing an unsightly black eye on their chosen faiths, are clearly neither sane nor rational.