NYT: Choosing Iowa as a Target for Gay Marriage Laws

[Pirate Smile]

Choosing Iowa as a Target for Gay Marriage Laws

By Katharine Q. Seelye

A court ruling today made Iowa the first state in the Midwest — and the third in the country — to allow same-sex marriage, putting it in a class with Connecticut and Massachusetts. This is a marker that not even the nation’s big blue coastal states, California and New York, have been able to achieve.
How did Iowa end up in the vanguard?
The decision to press the case in Iowa was a strategic one, every bit as calculating as those made every four years by presidential candidates when they go looking for votes.

“We chose Iowa because Iowa has a history, particularly at the state Supreme Court level, of taking the state constitution very seriously and making independent decisions based on the state constitution,” said Kevin Cathcart, executive director of Lambda Legal, which champions equality and civil rights for gay men and lesbian women and in 2005 initiated the case that resulted in today’s ruling.

The state’s high court has been ahead of the nation at large on major civil rights decisions. The court rejected slavery in 1839, and in 1868 ruled that Iowa public schools had to be desegregated — 86 years before the Brown versus Board of Education decision. In 1869, Iowa was the first state to allow a woman to practice law, three years before a United States Supreme Court ruling on the subject.

“Through analysis and research, we came to believe that Iowa was a place where we had a real chance of convincing the courts,” Mr. Cathcart said.

Iowa also has a long history of being on the progressive side on matters of war and peace. The state was positively dove-ish during the Vietnam War, and Barack Obama’s early opposition to the war in Iraq helped him win the Iowa caucuses in 2008.
Jim Leach, a liberal Republican and former Congressman from Iowa, said that he and his wife joke about the phenomenon of “coastal parochialism,” in which “outsiders on the East and West Coasts think that the hinterland is not progressive.”
But, he said, the state was first settled by those who objected to warring factions in Europe. And although just 2 percent of the population is black, he noted, “Iowa started the brushfire that put Barack Obama in the presidency.”

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/choosing-iowa-as-a-target-for-gay-marriage-laws/

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1. People look at loudmouths like King

And they assume everyone in Iowa is like that.