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Back in December, I wrote, Gay Marriage is a Human Right, Not a Religious Issue and rooted my argument in the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution and then to a lesser extend, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its provision that marriage and procreation are fundamental human rights.
In sum, I argued that 1. marriage is a fundamental human right (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written and adopted to define the fundamental freedoms and human rights mentioned in the United Nation's Charter, which is binding upon all member states, of which the United States is a founding member, and through the person of Eleanor Roosevelt had substantial input into and influence upon the Universal Declaration) and 2. American gay and lesbian people are citizens of the United States who therefore have the same rights to marry their freely chosen and freely chosen partners that straight people do.
I was roundly lambasted for treating as the intellectual rubbish they are "whatabouts" such as cousin marriage, polygamy, and bestiality. One was unaware that marriage is not reproduction. He also thought marriage was closely regulated by the state. In fact, no crime impinging upon either marriage or reproduction is so cruel that it abrogates a person's right to marry someone of the opposite sex and have children: not even rape, or wife-beating or wife-murder or marital rape, not impoverishing your husband or wife, not failure to provide, not incest, including with step-children, not child abuse or pedophilia, not the most reckless or willful failure to be responsible for your fertility. Another correspondent asserted that gay and lesbian people could marry, just people of the opposite sex, which is of course like saying to my husband and me, of course you can marry so long as it's to people of your own sex. (Thanks, no.) This correspondent also asserted that he didn't want gay people to marry because he couldn't imagine what it would have been like to grow up with two parents of the same sex, and asserted that anyone who disagreed with him was an idiot. One of these people was a lawyer who used his business email to leave me an anonymous note (if you read the about page, you will know I generally do not have much respect for people who do not sign their real names, as I do) and he got very upset when I sent him a private reply chiding him on his refusal to address the issues I raised in favor of raising issues of which he showed clear ignorance.
In short, none of them had the intellectual integrity or moral courage to say, marriage is not a fundamental human right, at least for gay people, and even if it is a fundamental human right, the Constitution does not apply to gay people.
Now the Iowa State Supreme Court has voided the ban on legal recognition of marriages between couples of the same sex finding it unconstitutional on grounds that it denied to gay people equal protection of the laws.
What is interesting about this opinion is that the reasoning is not only constitutionally correct but the tone of this opinion. I am neck-deep (and getting deeper) in The Doves: Chapters 10-16 written in draft between 26 Feb and 3 Apr, and that doesn't begin to count what I wrote to produce those drafts. Draft total: 53K words in five weeks. So I haven't contacted the Iowa Supreme Court, but the tenor of the opinion indicates disgust with the cowardice, moral and intellectual, people bring to the issue of same-sex marriages and an intention for their decision to be a model for future litigation. The impeccable, civilized legal language cannot disguise this attitude towards all those who think the marriages of same-sex couples should be denied equal protection of the law: still moving? Shoot them again.
Upon consideration, having reread the full opinion, which can be found here, in order to extract only what I thought were the juiciest bits (and I never thought the day would come when I would use language like that to describe a legal opinion), this is more along the lines of deliberately reloading with hollow-point before administering those insurance shots. As near as I can tell, the only way this opinion can be overturned in a way that withstands scrutiny is to amend the Iowa Constitution to eliminate the equal protection clause. But then, ignoring the equal protection clause of the US Constitution is the only way the Defense of Marriage Act was passed and gay people continue to
