grass roots for "gay marriage" in Iowa

From a report and analysis by the Washington Post's Keith Richburg as republished in the C-J...

For most of the country, the unanimous decision this month by the Iowa Supreme Court to legalize same-sex marriage was an unexpected and seemingly random victory for a movement that has long drawn its deepest support from major cities in liberal coastal states.

But for Camilla Taylor, a Chicago-based lawyer for the gay rights group Lambda Legal, it was the logical conclusion to a deliberate seven-year effort to make the Midwestern state one of the first in the country to allow same-sex marriage.

Coming just months after voters in California outlawed same-sex marriage, the decision was also a much-needed jolt for a group of loosely coordinated gay rights activists and legal experts who had been quietly building the case for marriage equality in states where they thought conditions were favorable, including Iowa and a handful in the Northeast....

In World, Joel Belz picks up the ball from the perspective of a Christian and a native of Iowa, expressing not so much surprise-- and recognizing the importance of this for the continuing "culture wars"...

It's an illusion fervently held by too many conservatives. If, they say, we could just get the decision-making processes of America relocated from the elitist enclaves to the masses "out there," culture would finally move in the right direction. "Out there," as in Iowa?

Yes, I understand that it was not the voters at large, but seven judges...

It doesn't make much difference. It's getting harder and harder these days to make a convincing argument that there's much distance between the values of the elites and those of the masses....

Does it surprise you that the county in the whole United States with the highest number of abortions per thousand population was for many years Iowa's Johnson County—the home of the University of Iowa? Good old hometown values, hard at work....

I love my home state...I wince when it's portrayed...as hickish or backwards....Iowa has always led the nation in literacy. But literacy in what? I no longer kid myself that just because they're at the middle of the middle of America, Iowans have their values straight....

But this isn't mainly about Iowa; it's about a whole nation headed the same direction....the Iowa primaries early in 2008 proved an accurate precursor to the election of Barack Obama...It's not that seven judges, totally out of touch with the people who put them on the bench, made a wacko decision. This native Iowan has to conclude instead—and with great sadness—that those judges may have a lot better handle on our culture than I dare to think.

I think it is difficult to make a biblical case for Christians embracing government activism as a means to avoiding "civil unions". (It is easier to oppose nonsensical "gay marriage".) In any case, the point from both essays is probably that we're going to see "it" soon. Perhaps it would be not only ethical/biblical, but also eminently practical, to have argued for civil unions-- when this train started rolling.

At this point, I doubt that we'll ever know. Moreover, it seems likely that we'll have something called "gay marriage" throughout much of the land within the next decade.