Iowa legalizes gay marriage

About fucking time!

Good job, courts, especially with this sentiment:

Our responsibility, however, is to protect constitutional rights of individuals from legislative enactments that have denied those rights, even when the rights have not yet been broadly accepted, were at one time unimagined, or challenge a deeply ingrained practice or law viewed to be impervious to the passage of time.

Basically, they argued that despite how normalized discrimination may be, it is their job to protect the folks that are being discriminated against. There’s four objections to this view that I know of (all fallacious in their own special way)

1) Rod Dreher’s stand that it makes it hard to be a “public Christian.”

His objection (and that of his lawyer friend) is that speaking out against gay marriage because of certain deeply held religious beliefs will in the future be grounds for harassment and is thus an assault on religious liberties. They ought to note that no Catholic argued that it would be hard for them to live in a society when divorce was legalized. If they did, they certainly don’t anymore. I’m not sure there remains a worry in the Catholic community that other people’s divorces make it hard for them to be “public Catholics” and speak out. Yes, it would no longer be so easy to disdain other people and hide behind religion, but how’s that bad? Unless Dreher believes that a category of speech that includes hate speech is the primary core of his religion, then it’s not a valid objection.

2) Gay marriage weakens traditional marriage somehow.

I’ll let Wanda Sykes explain how this point of view is needlessly moronic.

3) Homosexuality is a pleasure-centric worldview and gay marriage legitimizes the liberal ills of the sexual revolution.

When I think about an indulgence, as a straight male, I think of buying me an Xbox. I don’t think “ahh, I should indulge myself in some hot gay sex.” People that have gay sex presumably have the same amount of pleasure as people that have straight sex, give or take a little bit based on circumstance. The assumption that the only reason people have gay sex is for pleasure is horrific and insulting (even to me as a guy that’s desperately saving up for an Xbox 360…who the hell are you to tell me a certain kind of sex is what I ought to want as godless scum when I’d rather be shooting up some aliens?) What this says to me is that conservatives are convinced that in the absence of Biblical laws, we’d all be gay because it is somehow infinitely more pleasurable. I think it speaks to a latent fear among the older generation that if kids were allowed to have gay sex, they’d never have straight sex. A useful parallel was the fear among Jim Crow Americans that if black men were legally allowed to have sex with white women, white men would have no white women left to fuck. This sort of protectionist bullshit is a fear some parents have of their own children, not only gay people, but their own children.

4) The courts ought to have let the people decide.

The courts only heard the case because certain people were affected and brought it to the court's notice. The court then ruled they had a point and acted accordingly. There is such a thing as separation of branches of government as well as church and state. To imply that the courts must necessarily be at the mercy of their constituents places undue pressure on the judiciary from the legislative branch and is unconstitutional. This ruling does not preclude the people from voting in a knee-jerk bigot if that’s where their judgment’s at. Essentially, these folks are trying to kick the can 4 years down the road, as well as falsely claiming the support of “the people,” giving them no agency in the matter. It plays in well with the false semantic narrative regarding "civil unions," so I suspect we'll hear more of this in the future. Constitutional expansion of rights has many centuries of precedent and is not an example of “judicial activism.”