In just five days, leaders of Iowa, Vermont, and the District of Columbia have opted to protect marriage by ensuring that same-gender couples can marry.
Today, the District of Columbia’s City Council voted, 12-0, to recognize, in D.C., same-sex marriages, unions, and partnerships that are entered in other jurisdictions, according to The Washington Post. The vote is the first of several actions required before gay relationships entered elsewhere are recognized in the District.
The move follows the legalization of gay marriage by Vermont’s legislature, which today overrode a veto by Gov. Jim Douglas.
And it follows the nullification on Friday of Iowa’s religious-right law denying marriage to couples if they are homosexual.
The Des Moines Register reported on Saturday that some experts expect Iowa to benefit economically as well as socially from marriage equality due to Iowa’s isolation from the other states — Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont — to which gay couples, their families and friends may travel.
Meanwhile, Focus on the Family continues to promote mob rule, demanding that federal and state constitutional guarantees of equal protection to all citizens be sacrificed to the whims of angry mobs who seek to impose their own religious beliefs by force upon people who hold other religious perspectives.
Focus on the Family Action Senior Vice President Tom Minnery falsely stated that marriage equality permits polygamy; falsely assumes that socially conservative Iowa citizens enjoy a right to deny constitutional equality to fellow citizens; and insinuates that children are better off in orphanages or on the streets since there are not enough married heterosexual couples available to adopt American children:
The Iowa Supreme Court opened the door to all kinds of “marriage’ by using logic so broad and defective that the decision could well include polygamy. This ruling tramples on the will of Iowa citizens who enacted a law defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman in 1998 to help ensure every Iowan child had a chance to be raised in a household by a married mom and a dad.
Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst at Focus on the Family Action, implied that Iowa justices are wrong to protect all Iowans equally under the law, and that it is the proper role of justices to impose fundamentalist Christian social values upon all, rather than allowing individuals and couples the constitutional right to choose their own social values (whether they be liberal or conservative):
“The justices brazenly asserted that their role was not only to redefine marriage, but also to legislate whatever new social agenda they favored, ‘free from the influences’ of a society resistant to such change,” he said.
Antigay, anti-marriage activists Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage, Doug Napier of the Alliance Defense Fund, and Peter LaBarbera all similarly argued that mobs of voters enjoy a special right to deny constitutional equality to fellow citizens who are members of minority demographics. LaBarbera went further, equating same-gender affection with “evil.”
