Leaning Towards Equality
From yet another article trying to "understand" how Iowa could go for marriage equality:
This month, the Iowa Supreme Court found a state law banning same-sex marriage to be a violation of the state Constitution, in essence deeming the practice legal, as of this week. […]
In Des Moines, the state capital, observers of the court said the unanimous decision surprised them. Mark S. Kende, a law professor at Drake University, said he had viewed these justices as “more a lawyerly court than left-leaning or willing to stick its neck out on something like this.”
[in Monica Davey, "Same-Sex Ruling Belies the Staid Image of Iowa", New York Times, 25 April 2009.]
I object! That may be the problem right there. Marriage equality is not a left-leaning thing, it is a good-leaning thing.
I've saved the following quotation for awhile, thinking to write something about it, but I've found I really don't have much to add to Maupin's observation about how homosexuality — during my lifetime! — has been both a mental disease and a criminal offense — at the same time, no less. Does this shed any light on the "left-leaning" action of the supreme-court justices in Iowa?
We [Milk and Maupin] had come of age in a time when homosexuality was not only a mental disease but a criminal offense, so to be oneself and make lemonade from such long-forbidden fruit was exhilarating beyond belief.
Armistead Maupin, forward to the book Milk : A Pictorial History of Harvey Milk, Newmarket Press, 2009; quoted by Andy Towle, "EXCLUSIVE: Armistead Maupin on Harvey Milk's Last Love", Towleroad, 20 February 2009.]
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I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Tuesday, 28 April 2009 at 03.41
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That professor's statement also reveals another kind of presumptuousness
— a perverse kind at that. It appears he sees coming down on the side of
fairness is not lawyerly. That's quite a statement for a law professor
to make about the profession.
Strikes me as a dunderhead.
on Tuesday, 28 April 2009 at 11.18
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Struck me that way too, SW, but if I had said it, it would have been thought a partisan, liberal, commie-pinko-fag assessment no doubt. Naturally I think the judges were all quite lawyerly in recognizing constitutional fairness when they see it. Others will see it in time, if they take off their right-leaning glasses.