Let Dave actually submit his logical, but MORE IMPORTANTLY – law-based, arguments that are in keeping with the Iowa Constitution.

This is not about marriage, tradition, judicial activism, or any other rationalization du jour, and never has been for the people who would say: “You’re homosexual. You’re different. We can do whatever we like.”
It is simply about what it has always been about: how much the very existence of gay people offends, entices, obsesses, and frightens some straight people, as well as those-who-wanna-be-straight-but-ain’t.

This is what the south did with segregation. This is why SCOTUS stepped in. This is why it was right then and it is right now.

I am an american citizen, a tax payer, a law abiding and productive member of the ocmmunity, well thought of by family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors. Any man and woman, no matter how many times married, no matter if they killed their last spouse, no matter how ill advised it would for them to marry, let alone reproduce, can get married as often and as badly as they are legally able to do, and pop out children for no other reason than that they can. They don’t even need to be a taxpayer, or law abiding, or well thought of.

Yet they have more rights, benefits, and responsibilties than I do… which brings us to the real crux of the issue.

This is not about what the american people may think about gay people, marriage, or any of it. This is about how MY GOVERNMENT treats me and my husband. It is legally enjoined to treat me as an equal citizen, not as a special case because someone doesn’t like the fact that I am gay, or think their god doesn’t like it.

This argument about loss of sovereignty is nonsense. I haven’t lost any sovereignty. rather, I have finally been granted the sovereignty which is due to me by my birth, both as a human being and as an american citizen. The only soveriegnty anyone else has lost is the sovereignty known as the myth of heterosexual superiority and the realizty of heterosexual privilege. And the only people that have lost THAT are the people who believe that the myth is true and that they are entitled to it to begin with.

From the CT Supreme Court Decision:
Gay persons have been subjected to and stigmatized by a long history of purposeful and invidious discrimination that continues to manifest itself in society. The characteristic that defines the members of this group—attraction to persons of the same sex—bears no logical relationship to their ability to perform in society, either in familial relations or otherwise as productive citizens. Because sexual orientation is such an essential component of personhood, even if there is some possibility that a person’s sexual preference can be altered, it would be wholly unacceptable for the state to require anyone to do so. Gay persons also represent a distinct minority of the population. It is true, of course, that gay persons recently have made significant advances in obtaining equal treatment under the law. Nonetheless, we conclude that, as a minority group that continues to suffer the enduring effects of centuries of legally sanctioned discrimination, laws singling them out for disparate treatment are subject to heightened judicial scrutiny to ensure that those laws are not the product of such historical prejudice and stereotyping.

I am not going to argue that the judges were “activist judges,” that the judges “creatively reinvented the law,” or they stepped outside the “original bounds” of the Iowa Constitution to destroy “popular sovreignty. Rather, I would like first to remind you the Iowa Constitution and subsequent governmental policies and procedures are modeled after the United States.

It is a very common — and oft overstated — misconception that the United States is a democracy. It is not. The United States is a Constitutional Republic. In a pure democracy, the majority rules, WITH ABOLUTELY NO EXCEPTION. In a Constitional Republic, however, checks and balances are in place to ensure governmental powers and, YES, even the “majority ‘how I vote goes’ rule” voters do not always apply, especially when minority rights are being affected. This is where the COURTS APPLY. This is NOT called “activism”: it is called the Counstitution at work.

I strongly encourage those people who are not happy with the Iowa Supreme Court ruling — on this particular site, I do not expect there to be many — to read the ruling. Yes, it is long, but it is an eloquent and LOGICAL conclusion whose time has arrived. Dave, I encourage you to read this decision as you will also understand how the judges are especially not “activists,” but merely reading and applying the Iowa Constitution as it has always been applied in that state. The decision is rife with case law, and you are more than welcome to read Varnum v. Brian, 07-1499 at the Iowa Supreme Court Website below:

http://www.judicial.state.ia.us/Supreme_Court/Varnum_v_Brien/Supreme_Court_Ruling/index.asp

“The framers of the Iowa Constitution knew, as did the drafters of the United States Constitution, that “times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress,” and as our constitution “endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom” and equality.”

As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes poignantly said, “It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV.It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.”

In any other country you would laughed out of any conversation. Only in the U.S. are doctrines of Equal Protection and Due Process considered unbelievably complicated and intricate beyond anyone’s ken. Which is the result of 40+ years of strenuous and extreme efforts to pervert and annul these doctrines in the thinking of American voters.

As a result, only in this country is can people say in effect that there is such a thing as too much justice, too much rigor, and too much equality and be taken seriously. That catastrophe awaits the society for being too fair.