A message to win with. Same sex marriage

[IADEMO2004]

Original post link

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=103&topic_id=439529

From NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/opinion/09thrasher.html?_r=1&ref=opinion


Steven W. Thrasher
IF it weren’t for Iowa, my family may never have existed, and this gay, biracial New Yorker might never have been born.


In 1958, when my mother, who was white, and father, who was black, wanted to get married in Nebraska, it was illegal for them to wed. So they decided to go next door to Iowa, a state that was progressive enough to allow interracial marriage. My mom’s brother tried to have the Nebraska state police bar her from leaving the state so she couldn’t marry my dad, which was only the latest legal indignity she had endured. She had been arrested on my parents’ first date, accused of prostitution. (The conventional thought of the time being: Why else would a white woman be seen with a black man?)

On their wedding day, somehow, my parents made it out of Nebraska without getting arrested again, and were wed in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on March 1, 1958. This was five years before Nebraska would strike down its laws against interracial marriage, and almost a decade before the Supreme Court would outlaw miscegenation laws throughout the country in Loving v. Virginia.

When the good state of Iowa conferred the dignity of civic recognition on my parents’ relationship — a relationship some members of their own families thought was deviant and immoral, that the civil authorities of Nebraska had tried to destroy, and that even some of my mom’s college-educated friends believed would produce children striped like zebras — our family began. And by the time my father died, their interracial marriage was seen just as a marriage, and an admirable 45-year one at that.

That I almost cried last week upon reading that the Iowa Supreme Court overturned the state law banning same-sex marriage will therefore come as no surprise. I’m still struck by one thought: over the years, I’ve met so many gay émigrés who felt it was unsafe to be gay in so-called flyover country and fled for the East and West coasts. But as a gay man, I can’t marry in “liberal” New York, where I’m a resident, or in “liberal” California, where I was born, and very soon I will have that right in “conservative” Iowa.

End


I think there are thousand of stories like this waiting to be heard

[Peacetrain]

1. Good Read... Thank you

[Bluzmann57]

2. Who'd a thunk it?

We're more liberal than California or New York. But we like huntin' and fishin' and drinkin' beer so we can't be nuthin' but redneck hillbillies. Just goes to show you that one can't judge a person solely by where they live or what they enjoy.

[cyberswede]

4. I like the drinking beer part :)

[Tashca]

3. That's a great story....

I would have been 9 months old when his parents married. Now at 51 I can't imagine such a thing being possible for a State not letting a white and a black marry....that's really not that long ago and it helps me realize how things have changed so quickly. I know it's not quick enough for some, but change is happening none the less.

I guess every time I see someone post something that says they are shocked this could happen in Iowa, I am surprised. It makes me understand the rest of the country really has no clue about Iowa. This event doesn't surprise me at all and is one of the many reasons I love this State. We have our share of extremists form both sides......but the majority middle really is a fairly common sense group.

I find myself not proclaiming the greatness of Iowa. I was raised to not brag about where I live. I was told to not tell people about Iowa. I know this sounds crazy.....but their was a fear that others would want to come and spoil the wonderful things we had here.....I wonder if any others ever had any experiences like this??.....or was my family and my community the only ones that felt that way? I guess you could call it selfish....