Legal News

Iowa High Court Shoots Down Same-Sex Marriage Ban

By Ashby Jones

Across the great state of Iowa today, there’s presumably much rejoicing and much fist-pounding over the Iowa Supreme Court’s ruling today on same-sex marriage. The court unanimously struck down the state’s ban on gay marriage, making the Hawkeye State the third in which same-sex couples can tie the knot. Click here for the AP story; here for the NYT story; here for the opinion; here for a post from the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder.

In its decision, the court upheld a 2007 district court judge’s ruling that the law violates the state constitution.

“The court reaffirmed that a statute inconsistent with the Iowa constitution must be declared void even though it may be supported by strong and deep-seated traditional beliefs and popular opinion,” said a summary of the ruling issued by the court.

The case had been working its way through Iowa’s court system since 2005 when Lambda Legal, a New York-based gay rights organization, filed a lawsuit on behalf of six gay and lesbian Iowa couples who were denied marriage licenses. The ruling upheld an August 2007 decision by a state judge in Polk County, who found that a state law allowing marriage only between a man and a woman violates the state’s constitutional rights of equal protection.

The court addressed some of the petitioners’ arguments head-on:

We begin with the County’s argument that the goal of the same-sex marriage ban is to ensure children will be raised only in the optimal milieu. In pursuit of this objective, the statutory exclusion of gay and lesbian people is both under-inclusive and over-inclusive. The civil marriage statute is under-inclusive because it does not exclude from marriage other groups of parents–such as child abusers, sexual predators, parents neglecting to provide child support, and violent felons–that are undeniably less than optimal parents. Such under-inclusion tends to demonstrate that the sexual-orientation-based classification is grounded in prejudice or “overbroad generalizations about the different talents, capacities, or preferences” of gay and lesbian people, rather than having a substantial relationship to some important objective. See Virginia, 518 U.S. at 533, 116 S. Ct. at 2275, 135 L. Ed. 2d at 751 (rejecting use of overbroad generalizations to classify). If the marriage statute was truly focused on optimal parenting, many classifications of people would be excluded, not merely gay and lesbian people.

Indeed, reaction from Iowa residents was mixed. “Iowa is about justice, and that’s what happened here today,” said Laura Fefchak, a resident of Urbandale.

A disappointed Bryan English, spokesman for the conservative group the Iowa Family Policy Center, told the AP he’d continue to fight: “I would say the mood is one of mourning right now in a lot of ways, and yet the first thing we did after internalizing the decision was to walk across the street and begin the process of lobbying our legislators to let the people of Iowa vote.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 03, 2009 (boomark / email).