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Iowa and Gay Marriage and All That
Apr 06, 2009
Whaddup kids? I'm going to keep this short. Hooray for Iowa legalizing gay marriage. I was caught completely off guard, I try to keep at least kind of up to tabs with what is going on in my home state but had no clue this was coming.
I saw a lot of "I'm proud to be from Iowa" messages around Facebook and my IM clients and while I concur for more reasons than just this ruling, my feelings were temporarily tempered by comments left on some Iowa newspaper sites. The only one I still have is from my hometown paper. There are just some pretty awful comments comparing gays to sexual deviants and mentally ill groups. When I first read these on Saturday it made me realize that this was a court ruling and not a decision of 'the people' and kind of frustrated me to hear so many archaic reasons for opposition. I briefly allowed myself to believe this was a Midwestern or small-town sentiment but quickly (and thankfully) realized that it was simply because I surround myself with other liberal people out here. It isn't that I shun conservative thought, we all end up with people whose thought more closely resembles our own. I know there are the same arguments out here but they are not from those I regularly talk to and they are largely muted in a state which is quite liberal. It makes me want to seek out more people with other things in common but differing political viewpoints. I had a few of them but like so many in Boston, they moved away.
There was one other pretty cool thing I learned while reading about this ruling. Iowa was the first state to allow female lawyers (very bottom of the page). And if you want a bit more info about Arabella Mansfield, here it is.
It is kind of comical that on the same day this ruling was coming down I was in touch with an old friend I hadn't talked to in about a dozen years. My choice of words to describe my love life (perpetually single) caused him to question my "orientation" and swear up and down it didn't matter to him, he loved me either way. It was pretty funny, and timely.
I think the one comment about mental-illness was moreso an attack on religion than gay-marriage/homosexuality. Either way the comments are surprising. Gay marriage is a polarizing conversation/debate IMO.
I think(hope!) that Daryl Beall is right and nobody will even think about this in 10 years.
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And as if to prove my point about there being closed-minded thought around here. The third comment down... http://www.boston.com/ae/celebrity/more_names/blog/2009/04/barack_obama_marthas_vineyard.html
And no, I am not claiming racist thoughts to be conservative or liberal and in retrospect I hope I wasn't too quick to categorize the thoughts in the previous post...