Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain

That’s Iowa’s state motto and it seems apt in light of today’s events.

The Hawkeye State’s Supreme Court upheld a 2007 Polk County ruling which essentially said that denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples violated the equal protection clause of the state constitution. When that ruling was handed down, Iowans had less than a day of legal same-sex marriage because the county appealed the decision to the highest court in the state, and the judge postponed any further marriage licenses until that court could rule on the matter. I briefly touched on this when it happened and I mentioned that only one couple, Tim McQuillan and Sean Fritz, came back with a completed marriage license within the 22-hour deadline. No major news outlets and only one blog has bothered talking to them since.

In its unanimous opinion, the court explicitly pointed at the arguments against same-sex marriage rooted in religious tradition and stated that the state government cannot have any religious views of its own. If recent bans on same-sex marriage (including California’s) are any indicator, religious conservative groups will continue to motivate action on this issue using religious dogma but will either veil that language or remove it from their final actions. We, as a country, still have little recourse for half-truths.

Republican State Senator Paul McKinley issued a statement to the Des Moines Register saying that he thinks all Iowans should have a voice on the matter, so the state’s legislature should immediately pass a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a bond between one man and one woman. In other words, he thinks everyone should have a voice — as long as it’s his.

You can read the Iowa Supreme Court opinion here.

A shaky proposition

Watch the California state Supreme Court hearing on the validity of Proposition 8, which overturned the rights of same-sex couples to marry:

Watch the video here.

Update:
Initial impressions: Earlier counsel wasn’t terrible, but very boring and couldn’t stand up to even the slightest resistance from the panel.

I’d forgotten how much Ken Starr sounds like Tim Gunn. I kept half-expecting him to tell the justices to “make it work,” and then — ZING! — he references “Damn Yankees”!? Even the justices seem to recognize how cheesy he’s being.

Therese Stewart is about as excellent as she can be. She let her frustration show toward the end but she does not wilt under judicial scrutiny. The court went hard on her, but it had to: You can’t just overturn something the voters approved on hazy “that’s the ticket” ideas and without acknowledging whether this could set a precedent for limiting the people’s power.

I still can’t believe that a cable channel billed as the C-SPAN for California state affairs isn’t on digital basic.