Iowa’s Family Values

[FreeState]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/opinion/09thrasher.html?em

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.

...snip...

It’s safe to say that neither the dramas of our family, nor its triumphs, could have been possible without the simultaneously radical and conservative occasion of my parents’ civil marriage in Iowa. And so when the time comes, I hope to be married at the City Hall in Council Bluffs, in the state that not only supports my civil rights now, but which supported my parents’ so many years ago.

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Iowa fascinates me. It has quite a history when it comes to Civil Rights.

[Inspired]

1. This is quite a story! Iowans have always felt that Nebraska was nuts.

Now we have some solid proof!

[FreeState]

2. I have a friend who's current life parallels this quite well

He is gay but not out to his parents. Hes not out because when his sister came out they followed her around until she moved back home with them as an adult (she is now unhappily married with small children). A few weeks ago my friend caught a private investigator photographing him and his partners residence. They are literally stocking him to make sure he isnt gay or in a relationship. I wont even go into how messed up my friend is - and all of it has roots in how his parents treat him.

[rurallib]

3. This Iowan thanks you for painting Iowa in a nice light.

We always need the old image polished.

[Prophet 451]

4. Iowa's Family Values =

Iowa Values Families.